Thanks you for this, I LOVE it. I have always used what I call "fill in the blank" essays. It gives students confidence, not just struggling writers, but competent writers. Love it, love it!

Dear Mariely,

Thank you for taking the time to be so include so many details within your ideas. I will check out the website. For now, you have given me many good things to think about as I prepare my students for good writing techniques and habits.

I have a few books that I have bought that have writing lessons. I also bought one called Essential Words for Middle Grade Students; looks good.

Have a great day!

Dan

You are most welcome 5/6 Teach! Glad you found it resourceful!

Thank you Mariely for the fantastic web site. I downloaded a lot. I'm excited!

Hello Dan!

You definitely need to check out Melissa Forney's new Young Writer's Survival Kit. She has it available as a free download on her site. Just go to www.melissaforney.com and look for the link right on her home page. If it's not there, look for it in the Free Handouts tab.

As far a s good writing ideas for narratives, I usually tell my students that a narrative needs to tell a story and it also needs to have the passing of time. I also make sure students don't linger on unimportant details, for example, starting a story from the moment they woke up when they just need to write about a field trip they had. The middle of their narrative writing needs to contain transitional phrases that show the passing of time, events in order, and lots of details to help the reader picture what they are writing about.

Persuasive and informational writing are almost the same. Both need to have reasons that the writing needs to explain or support through examples, mini-stories, etc. I'm going to look more into persuasive writing since I'm in the middle of getting acquainted with it in order to help teachers at my school. With informational writing, I usually tell my students that in the middle they need to have a transitional phrase (i.e. simply stated, to illustrate my point, by the same token), followed by their reason, an example of their reason, details about it, and maybe a mini-story to make it more personal. Students can have anywhere between 2 to 3 reasons in the body of their writing.

Hope this helps! If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. You can also check out my blog here on ProTeacher. Just go to the blog page and look for the "Creative Teacher" blog. I have more writing ideas there. Take care!

I'm a firm believer in modeling. Many students get the concept from the models they simply see in paragraphs they read. Others need more definitive modeling, and thus I created the attached. You can start a student anywhere along the continuuml; they don't need to start with #1. Ignore the beginning of the file. What you need is further on.

I'm brand new to 5th grade. I am the writing/ grammar teacher in a partially departmentalized PA school.

Any good writing ideas for narratives?

For Persuasive?

Informational?

Writing Effective Paragraphs?

Thanks,

Dan