Are you or your students out of ideas for writing? This product is just the thing for your class!
Students roll dice to determine what to write. Avoid the problem of taking forever to brainstorm by having students roll dice and select writing elements according to these charts. Options are included for both fiction and non-fiction writing.
They are general enough to provide choice and creativity, but specific enough to point students in the right direction.
Click the link below to download and be sure to leave a comment either here or on Teachers Pay Teachers after you use it. I'd love to see how creative your students get!
In honor of Black History Month and reading My Brother Martin and Meby Christine King Farris (Martin's sister) in our fourth grade Journeys book, we decided to compare and contrast Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela.
My class is a 1:1 Chromebook class, so we did this assignment together as a class on Google Docs.
If you haven't used Google Docs as a class, I suggest going over a procedure for erasure. If someone accidentally deletes the graphic organizer, we all stop immediately and take hands off the keyboards until the mistake can be fixed by the person who deleted or until the previous version can be restored.
The great thing about this lesson is that I have adapted it for you so that it can be used in whole or in parts, independently or in small or whole groups. This would even be great if you homeschool! Rubrics are included for different expectations. You also don't have to search for resources to make sure they are appropriate since I've included links for you!
See more pages and download this resource in my TPT store.
My students and I just read Me and Uncle Romie by Claire Hartfield in our Journeys book. It's a fictional story written from the first-person point-of-view of James, who was a nephew of real-life deceased artist Romare Bearden.
They almost immediately recognized the illustrations as being familiar because we recently finished reading a poetry book called My Man Blue from our Making Meaning / Collaborative Literacy Pilot. Both books were illustrated by Jerome Lagarrigue.
These books were perfect for lightly touching upon segregation and discrimination while teaching kids about friendship, family, and life in New York City / Harlem.
Check out some of Romare's artwork on the Romare Bearden Foundation website. Make sure to preview images of his art before showing students! One neat project we didn't get to do just yet was collage art. Hopefully we will have some time soon!
A fun extension we did was to write letters to friends and family across the U.S., North America, and all around the world. We asked them to send us a letter or email back tell us what they did with Oliver.
Every year, I feel the time crunch between Thanksgiving break and December winter break. This fun poem writing activity helps us practice poem writing and parts of speech. Plus, it's fun to color and stick up on a bulletin board!
Students get to pick a Google Slide and then they type their poem in the text box. It's easy to print all of them because they are all in one presentation. No one has deleted anyone else's slide, but it's a pretty easy fix if they do because I keep a master copy and then share an editable one with them in Google Classroom / Drive.
Here are a couple of slides from the Google Slides presentation I created to go along with the song.
Find the editable poem presentation in my TPT store here.
This 30 slide PowerPoint presentation includes 28 editable fill-in-the-blank poem pages with directions an examples. You will also get a link to the editable Google Slides presentation. These poems look great as a bulletin board. Just print, color, cut, and glue onto construction paper!
