Do you struggle to help your students become engaged with writing? Textbook exercises and worksheets teach skills, but don’t give students any reason to care about the writing skills they are learning. We have all done the rote task of underlining the nouns once and the verbs twice. This kind of work does not inspire a love of writing.
Consider teaching one or two necessary skills in a mini- lesson, and then engaging students in writing for real reasons and real audiences. These activities will allow students to practice and refine their skills while creating content that they will enjoy and find relevant, which increases their motivation to use and remember the skills they are taught. Any of these activities can easily include school, state or Common Core English Language Arts standards.
1. Arrange for students to interview nursing home residents to capture details about the residents life or life in the past. Students then write up their stories in the form of a biography or historical essay. After revising and editing, students can share stories with the resident.
2. Allow students to write a play or skit with content from any of their content area curriculum. Students will be working with both content information and writing conventions. Encourage great headlines too. Imagine your classroom coming alive with The Time Travels of George Washington or DNA Rock Stars: Watson and Crick Live! The chance to perform is often extremely motivating.
3. After teaching letter writing conventions, have students write letters to people around the school who help them on a daily basis. One of our former students recently had her class write Valentine’s Day letters and then secretly deliver them.
4. Engage students in writing a history of your school or your town. Students can learn to interview, research primary documents and ultimately write their own historical document. It works well to divide students into smaller teams- each team taking a set of years or topic to research and write about.
5. Give student the choice to write a sequel, a new chapter, or a different ending to a book or story they have just finished reading. Another idea is to write the story from a different perspective, ala The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka. Students can also modernize old fairy tales, myths or classical stories.
6. Introduce students to informational writing. Have them write a school handbook from the student’s perspective. This can be revised and edited and eventually included with information for new students.
7. Create a living museum. Students research a living or dead person. They create a poster or tri-fold display and then write an introduction speech as if they were that person. Students dress up like their characters and present a living museum, sharing their speeches with each other or an audience of peers or parents.
8. Arrange to have students work with a pen pal from another part of the country. Students can exchange letters, stories, informational writing and poems with other students via the internet.
9. Read different types of poetry and teach students the formats for different kinds of poems. After experimenting with different forms, let students choose their favorites and create a class poetry book. They can illustrate them using either traditional or graphic design tools.
10. Create a classroom webpage. Empower students to write and upload the content!
11. Find student’s passions and then let them write about it. Robots, cooking, concussions in the NFL, saving the earth, yoga, politics, current events, cafeteria food, hunting and fishing laws, and movies are all examples of topics students have passionately researched and written about. This is a great way to explore different writing products and let students choose a format that makes sense, whether it is a poster in the hallway, a letter to the local paper, or a family inspired cookbook with recipes and the stories behind them.
These are just a few ideas to help students engage with writing. We know you have many more ideas and we would love to hear them in the comments!
Happy writing,
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