Writing Activities for Kids

A Bottlenose Dolphin needed my help to get a fishing hook and line of it's left pectoral fin.

When I talk with elementary school teachers about introducing the concept of supporting ideas with reasons and references to the text, I often get puzzled looks. This is understandable. Common Core, however, asks students to do this as young as third grade. This pedagogical shift away from just selecting a multiple choice response is daunting, but can be so rewarding for students. Teachers are thinking about how to answer the question: How do you know? Teachers need to probe students not to select the desired answer, but to add proof, support opinions, and interrogate text for how authors do the same. The Teaching Channel has a great 2 minute model that shows how to use sentence frames with elementary students.

There’s a reason for why certain storytelling elements just keeps coming back, again and again.

Well, it’s because they work.

I’ve done some research and collected the different storytelling elements in one place.

Here we go:

I love what comics can do for kids. I’ve seen reluctant readers introduced to the joy of books by way of comics. I watched a teen develop an abiding interest