Writing Resources

This page is dedicated to providing resources for k-12 classroom teachers looking to enrich their students opportunities in Writing. (Please note that these are teacher resources. If you plan to have students establish accounts on these sites, please see Terms of Service for that specific site with regard to student privacy settings, age restrictions, and COPPA guidelines. If you have questions about a certain site, please contact your school’s Library Media Specialist.)

Differentiation Ideas for Students

• Connect to epals- allowing the students to have writing pals with students abroad.

• Pen Pals: My students have a pen pal relationship with a classroom of refuge ELL students in Amal, Sweden, De Pere’s sister city. Opportunities exist for other classrooms as well. Contact Dana Lex at WDPHS for more information.

• Students Write Elementary Blog

• Seesaw Digital Portfolios

• Using Twitter as Assessment: Use this form to allow students to write a tweet about the most important thing they learned that day - either in a specific subject or from the whole day, which teacher then uses to guide the next day’s instruction. Teacher posts the best tweets each day.

• Write a Book Review: Students write Book Reviews on Google Docs, generate a QR code and post it on Seesaw, draw a picture of their representation of the book and paste the QR code somewhere on the picture. Book review illustrations are bound in a class book, which students and parents can view, then scan codes to read the reviews.

• 21 Clever Writing Prompts That Will Unleash Your Students’ Creativity

• Various Writing Contests

• 7 Elements of Differentiated Writing Lessons

• Letters About Literature: This is a contest run through the Library of Congress every year, but my students have taken advantage of the idea to write letters to authors of their books in hopes of getting a response.

• Connect with authors on Twitter: Our class tries to connect with authors after they’ve read their books. Elly Swartz, author of Finding Perfect, agreed to a Google Hangout with a student, who’s doing her Genius Hour project on OCD, the topic the book was about. Interview with author. That prompted others in my class to contact authors by their Twitter handles again (we did this before, in the beginning of the year, but didn’t get any bites.) One author, @CorneliaFunke (Inkheart) responded to another of my students as a result of all this. She requested the student send her a list of questions via email, which the student did that very day she was so excited. Cornelia Funke wrote back with a 2-pg email answering all the student's questions.

• Elementary School Writing Apps and Websites

• John Spencer's Visual Writing Prompts

• What's Going on in this picture? Pictures taken from the NY Times, without a caption, and a moderated conversation about the image, with related articles. Updated weekly.

• What's Going on in this Graph? Graphs, maps and charts from The New York Times -- and an invitation to students to discuss them live.

• Is a picture really worth 1000 words (about 2 pages)? Have your students prove it. Use one of these sites (National Geographic, NASA, CNN Photos, Sport photos, Pobble 365, New York Times) to post a thought provoking image of science, nature, current events, art, machinery, cultures, or daily life for a writing prompt.

• Arts Edge- The Kennedy Center's free digital resource for teaching and learning in, through and about the arts.

  • Building Deeper Readers and Writers - Kelly Gallagher

Project Based Learning Resources

• Choose Your Own Adventure Template

  • Choose Your Own Adventure Example

• News They Can Use: Check out digital-age citizen journalism projects at Blog post and ideas on Student Journalism projects

• 2017 State Literary Competition: Illustrated Fictional and Enhanced Personal Narrative Book Competition: Annual book writing/illustrating contest for students in grades 3-12 sponsored by Delta Kappa Gamma

Tools for Students and Teachers

• FlipGrid - Empower Student Voice with this tool, while they capture short videos to share ideas with classmates on topics you define.

• RecapThat - A free student response and reflection app to allow parents and teachers insight on how students learn and think.

• Movenote - Narrate an existing Powerpoint or Google presentation to document directions or to present and reflect.

• Explain Everything - Collaborative and Interactive White Board

• Nearpod - Interactive Lesson plan tool for sharing and collaborating in groups

• Padlet - collaborative resource for students and teachers

• GoogleKeep - Project Management tool for teachers and students

• Go Soap Box - Backchanneling tool and real time quizzes and feedback