Writing Activities and Strategies
This section covers activities that will help students develop their independent writing skills. Unlike the section in Learning to Read, this section goes above and beyond early writing skills by implementing and applying those skills to create an outstanding product. These activities will help upper elementary students apply writing skills to create actual written works now.
Roll-A-Story
|
|
Picture This Writing
- Synopsis: Students love to write about topics that directly affect them. Picture This Writing allows students to take place their audience in an element that interests them (i.e. Picture this.. my favorite place) while at the same time practicing their writing skills.
- Materials: Writing template glued onto construction paper, camera cut-out, white construction paper glued onto black construction paper, glue, writing utensil, and crayon.
- Directions: First have students pick their favorite place to visit. Next have students write about their favorite place describing it to the audience. Once finished writing, draw and color a corresponding picture of your favorite place. Lastly glue everything together!
Round Robin Writing
|
Amazon Book Listing
- Synopsis: Book listing provides information for potential readers about the current book they are looking at. Amazon Book Listing gives students the opportunity to create a book listing for their favorite book to showcase information they read while incorporating various writing skills.
- Materials: Amazon Book Listing template, writing utensil, and crayons.
- Directions: Each student is given a template for them to fill in information for their current book. They are to include the title of the book, author, book level, year published, a star rating, summary, and three additional book suggestions. All writing is supposed to original and done by the student to see both the student’s writing skills and the summarization skills.
Guess What? A Writing Game
- Synopsis: By the time students end fourth grade, they will need to start learning how to write vivid sentences. This can be very challenging; therefore, this game allows children to build those skills by describing an object and having a partner guess.
- Materials: Clipboards, writing utensil, loose-leaf paper, and timer.
- Directions: Break students into partners and have each student secretly focus on one object in the room without letting the other person know what it is. Each will write as many sentences as possible describing the object in 30 seconds. For Round one, a description must use at least three adjectives. In future rounds, consider other requirements as well, such as one metaphor or one simile. Players then switch clipboards, read each other’s descriptions and try to guess what object is being described. Play this game a few rounds, and each round increase the amount of time each player writes about the object. So, if the first round is 30 seconds, make the second round one minute, the third round one and a half minutes, and so on.