New Creative Writing Ideas for elementary students.

Out With the Old?

Many students develop old ideas in their stories: the beach (which we discussed earlier) theme parks, the zoo, birthday parties, are all ideas that are worn out from being used so often. I got so tired of my students picking the same old ideas and doing the exact same things with those ideas that I designed a poster with many of the most worn-out story ideas.
I then told my students that the only way they could choose one of the ideas listed is to change it from a dinosaur, as I mentioned earlier, to at least a parrot idea, one that has been done, but is at least engaging and creative in its presentation.
Here are a few examples of how my students keep the old idea, but just "freshen it up" a little in the development. A birthday party would become interesting if the piñata suddenly came to life. A trip to the zoo would be exciting if perhaps one of the animals escaped or started to speak English. A ride on a roller coaster would be engaging when the ride is a means of getting to another time or place.
See this poster and all our other products at www.thewriteprescription.com or
on www.teacherspayteachers.com  under The Write Prescription/Bill MacDonald

Fun Way to Learn New Vocabulary What's in a Word?

Students love to find words they've never seen or heard of before. A fun way to put their curiosity to work is directing them to search for high level words in their textbooks, class sets, or any library books. Once they have found several, they will write the sentence containing the words in context, predict what the word means, then look it up in the thesaurus or dictionary. After they have learned what the words really mean, have them make up three other sentences using the words in a meaningless, nonsensical way. Now the competition begins! Ask your students to take turns reading a sentence to each other and guess which one uses the word correctly. The winner is the team of students which guesses the most correctly written sentences after everyone has had an opportunity to read. This activity will be beneficial in the following ways: Number one, it exposes your students to more vocabulary to include in their compositions; and secondly, it helps in the area of Reading with word meaning. Have a bodacious time!