Story Starters: Creative Writing Prompts for Kids. If you’re looking to inspire your students’ writing and creativity, turn to these fun and exciting writing prompts. Perfect for overcoming writer’s block or even starting a brand-new short story in a different narrative, creative writing prompts can help students begin a new piece with confidence.
Plus, these story starters can also encourage students to explore different genres while honing their writing skills. There are a lot of ways you can use writing prompts in your classroom. Try: Reading a book in a genre, then having students use a story starter in that same genre. Starting off class with 10 minutes of writing, using one of the prompts below. If you'd like, you can ask a volunteer to share their story! Take inspiration from classics like Treasure Island and newer popular series like The Bad Guys to explore how to write thrilling adventure stories.
You’re part of a pirate crew in search of a long-lost storied treasure trove. The wonderful world of writing! These are writing prompts and paper that I use throughout the whole year. There are over 25 of them...all for you! :) I put them in writing centers, sometimes use them in whole group lessons, and even use them as "fast finishers".
The kiddos love them! I ALWAYS do an example page for them. Some of the writing papers don't have specific things that they have to write about....For instance, the "Spring Fun" page. The students can really write about anything that has to do with spring. Here are some of my favorites {and the kiddos too}! I've also included a writing rubric for you! Small Group Writing Instruction Makes Me Smile {Part 1} I have been excited to share this ever since the idea popped into my head late last year, but I wanted to give it some time to trial (and error!) In my room first ;) If you have been following my blog for a while, you know that I love and adore the Daily 5 model in reading and Math Rotations in math.
The thought finally occurred to me, why not try a similar structure in Writer's Workshop? So, Writing Groups was born: Because I have learned that I am the type of teacher who loves small groups over whole-group, I decided to give it a go with this year's class, especially since it is 2/3 boys and I typically lost my boys the most during Writer's Workshop time.
I felt I lost them (and also any kids who just didn't *love* writing) not really in the whole-group instruction time, but mainly in the independent writing time. I decided first on the four groups I wanted to incorporate to help my students not just become better writers, but to get excited about purposeful writing again. Small Group Writing Instruction Makes Me Smile {Part 1} Compare.pdf (application/pdf Object) Graphic Organizers. Venn Interactive | Fuel the Brain Interactives. Describing a Place | Teaching KIds to Write with Vivid Vocabulary. “Descriptive writing is an art form. It’s painting a word picture so that the reader ‘sees’ exactly what you are describing.” ~Brenda Covert This post contains affiliate links. Read our full disclosure policy. What’s the big deal about writing descriptively? For one thing, it’s much more than page-filling fluff. Writers use this powerful method to make their pieces memorable—even brilliant—rather than dry and boring.
Even if your child never aspires to write stories or poetry, description is a wonderful skill to develop. Describing a Place Vivid writing is especially important when describing a place — whether to describe a vista for a travel guide or flesh out a scene in a novel. Master storyteller Charles Dickens was also a master of using description to create a mood. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. Suppose he’s planning to write about a desert. Using a Search Engine. Here Is An Excellent Web Tool for Creating Classroom Newspapers. February 2, 2016 Printing Press is a great web tool from ReadWriteThink that you can use with students in class to easily create beautiful newspapers, flyers and brochures.
The tool is very easy to use and students will definitely love working on it. Printing Press provides multiple pre-made templates to choose from when creating a newspaper. Finished works can be saved and shared with others through emails or you can print out paper versions to distribute in your class. Additionally, you can save your unfinished newspaper as a draft and use a simple WYSIWYG to edit it later on.
Whether you want to create and publish class newspapers or design informational brochures and flyers announcing class events, Printing Press is absolutely a wonderful tool to try out. To start using Printing Press, click on ‘get started’ from this page. Make It Count: Providing Feedback as Formative Assessment. Providing students with feedback on written work can, at times, feel like a burden. Dozens (perhaps even hundreds) of papers clutter your desk, and commenting on each is nearly impossible.
Still, we know, both from our experiences and from research, that feedback is essential. John Hattie, Professor of Education and Director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia, believes that feedback must be timely, relevant, and action-oriented. The good news, according to Hattie, is that "students want feedback just for them, just in time, and just helping nudge forward. " So how can we provide this kind of feedback -- the kind that students actually listen to, understand, and use -- in a timely manner?
Feedback as Formative Assessment Anyone involved in standardized testing knows two things: the results take entirely too long to get back and are completely impersonal, making that kind of feedback essentially irrelevant. Feedback in Action Feedforward. Story Starters: Creative Writing Prompts for Kids.