Use the Franklin Institute's exhibition "An Inquirer's Guide to the Universe" to have students research ideas for a science fiction story. After completing their research, writers will compose science fiction stories that incorporate...

Use formatting to organize an explanatory essay after comparing and contrasting expository and narrative genres. Young writers explore expository writing by employing prewriting techniques and graphic organizers to plan an essay. This is...

Young writers participate in a game to practice making contractions and using the apostrophe properly.

Here is an amazing lesson on story writing for young writers. After listening to a history of chocolate, learners utilize the many worksheets embedded in the plan to construct their own stories about chocolate. They must cut out the...

What is your idea of paradise? Middle and high schoolers share their visions of paradise on earth in this lesson, in which they view a video segment about Shangri-La. Your high schoolers can discuss and then write about their ideas in a...

Scholars discuss the many ways they use persuasion in their everyday lives and brainstorm specific ideas for encouraging someone to do something. With the list of persuasive techniques they made, young writers complete a graphic...

O. Henry's "The Gift of the Magi" is the classic example of irony in literature. Teach young writers about the ways irony can engage their readers with an activity in which they write scripts using dramatic irony, situational irony, and...

The fifth installment in a writing unit that culminates with a Hyperstudio illustrated group story project, this plan is ripe with ideas for ways to design group writing projects for elementary writers. Use the whole unit as a base from...

Young writers try their hand at writing descriptive sentences. Learners look at four photographs that are accompanied by sentence frames. Their job is to fill in the frame with appropriate and descriptive words based on the photograph. A...

In this language arts worksheet, young writers consider four action photographs, and must write three descriptive words that could be used to describe what they see. The words are then used in complete sentences. An interesting way to...

Help your young writers use logic in their persuasive writing. Discuss the characteristics of a persuasive paper, and have pupils work together to explore and solve a syllogism. They will write a short persuasive paper which includes a...

Help writers recognize how word order affects meaning, discover new words, and confirm or check meaning writing. They will explore how punctuation helps a reader understand what is written and the connections between punctuation,...

Use a Mad-Libs like activity to create modern poetry! Writers will identify different words and their parts of speech and study "The Red Wheelbarrow" by Williams Carlos Williams. Then, use the sheets attached to craft your own poem! An...

Read the descriptive paragraph (included) with your middle schoolers, and have them study the stylistic elements included. They'll look for vivid verbs, alliteration, assonance, similes, and personification. Before writers craft their...

Early writers practice printing the upper and lower case letter 'J' on this traditional letter tracing worksheet. The first example provides numbered arrows to indicate the direction and order of strokes. Additionally, there are three...

An excellent language arts worksheet. Learners read seven sentences and determine if each is simple, compound, or complex. In order to practice sentence combining, young writers join 10 sets of sentences to form compound sentences, and...

An alien at dinner? An eerie train whistle? A parent trying to be hip? Get your creative writers going with a list of story starters.

The focus of this writing instructional activity is to have writers revise and edit a three-paragraph passage to eliminate wordiness and repetition. The paragraphs are quite long, and this should take most students quite a while to...

Young writers determine whether the 19 nouns in the box are accountable or uncountable. They place each noun in the Venn Diagram and then fill in each blank in 9 sentences with the words a, an, any and/or some. A good worksheet!

Congratulations! You've been hired as a song writer! Assign your class this webquest so they can research a Hispanic musician and their country, and then write a song in Spanish!

Use this communication skills lesson to emphasize evaluating a speaker's main point and argument. After reading Martin Luther King's, "I Have a Dream Speech" and John F. Kennedy's speech, "I Believe in an America Where the Separation of...

How does one use a graphic organizer to plan writing? Introduce your writers to different types of graphic organizers by dividing the class into groups and assigning each group a particular organizer. Then, as they research chocolate...

Help your young writers recognize the importance of composing formal letters. Middle schoolers read letters written by Thomas Jefferson and analyze the components that make it a formal letter.  They will then compose their own...

The epic clash of reason and emotion comes to life in this informative presentation. Detailing the period of Romanticism in 19th century Europe, these slides contain pictures of the most famous pieces of art during this period. Viewers...