Rummaging for Fiction: Using Found Photographs and Notes to Spark Story Ideas ReadWriteThink couldn't publish all of this great content without literacy experts to write and review for us. If you've got lessons plans, activities, or other ideas you'd like to contribute, we'd love to hear from you. More Find the latest in professional publications, learn new techniques and strategies, and find out how you can connect with other literacy professionals. More Teacher Resources by Grade Your students can save their work with Student Interactives. More Home › Classroom Resources › Lesson Plans Lesson Plan Overview Featured Resources From Theory to Practice Found notes and photographs can provide inspiration for pieces of creative writing. back to top Online Photograph and Document Resources: Use these resources to search for interesting found images and notes. Literary Elements Mapping Tool: Use this online tool to map out the key literary elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution. Further Reading Albers, Peggy. NCTE Executive Committee. 2005.
Audio Broadcasts and Podcasts: Oral Storytelling and Dramatization ReadWriteThink couldn't publish all of this great content without literacy experts to write and review for us. If you've got lessons plans, activities, or other ideas you'd like to contribute, we'd love to hear from you. More Find the latest in professional publications, learn new techniques and strategies, and find out how you can connect with other literacy professionals. More Teacher Resources by Grade Your students can save their work with Student Interactives. More Home › Classroom Resources › Lesson Plans Lesson Plan Overview Featured Resources From Theory to Practice Students begin this lesson by discussing what makes a good, vivid story and creating a working checklist of the criteria for a good story. back to top War of the Worlds Travelogue: Students can use this online tool to explore background information about the 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds. Plot Diagram Tool: This online tool allows students to graphically map the events in a story. Further Reading
Teaching With Podcasts Home › Professional Development › Strategy Guides Strategy Guide Podcasts are serial recordings, posted regularly online. Robert Rozema describes a podcast as "a blog in audio form" (31). Basically, producing podcasts is the technology-based equivalent of oral storytelling. Much as oral stories and news have been shared with listeners by medieval bards, Native American storytellers, and others, podcasters share news and stories with their listeners, who download the files online. Podcasts can be used for any purpose a text might serve-they can tell fictional stories, share and comment on recent events, inform listeners about a topic, and persuade listeners to take an action or adopt a stance. Students can produce podcasts that fit any genre, including audio diary entries, analytical commentary on readings or current events, informational recordings that explain concepts, and persuasive and argumentative statements.
National Day on Writing: A Celebration Figment.com Update | Oct. 21: The National Day on Writing was a great success. Thanks to the thousands who participated; we did our best to chronicle the remarkable response throughout. Why do you write? Because I am a spider and words are my silk. to think, to converse, to express, to solve, to explain, to persuade, to motivate, to … because I’m in love 2 get 10 years worth of stories out of my head. Because I sound smarter when I write than when I speak. because saying words is nice, but writing them down lasts longer I write because writing is crack, and I’m an addict. We fished the answers above out of the Twitter stream of contributors to the hashtag #whyIwrite, and on Thursday, Oct. 20, the National Day on Writing, we’re inviting you to post your answers there as well. So please: spread the word, start thinking about what you would like to say and encourage your students to join in. In addition… From the National Writing Project: And From Us, The New York Times Learning Network: 2. 3.
Using Opening Lines From the Magazine's 'Lives' Column as Writing Prompts Illustration by Will Bryant. Sticker illustration by Dan Cassaro.A recent edition of The New York Times Magazine. This student writing challenge was inspired by the “Lives” column found there weekly.Go to the Lives index » We’re celebrating Oct. 20, the National Day on Writing, in all kinds of ways, and this is the first. Along with Figment, an online community where teenagers and young adults come together to discover, create and share new reading and writing, we’re inviting students to use the first lines we’ve collected below — all taken from the “Lives” column, the long-running essay series that appears in the back of The New York Times Magazine each week — and use them as jumping-off points for their own stories, essays, plays, memoirs or poetry. Then, through Nov. 10, we’re inviting young writers to post their original pieces on a specially dedicated page on Figment that will become a public library of “Lives”-inspired stories. Happy writing! First Lines from Selected “Lives” Columns
What We Eat, Where We Sleep: Documenting Daily Life In August, two slide shows were published on NYTimes.com that both seemed so useful for classrooms that we saved them until the school year began to present together in a lesson. On the Well blog, Tara Parker-Pope featured 15 photos from a book called “What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets” that has become an exhibit at the Museum of Science in Boston. Here’s how she described it: In an unusual project, Peter Menzel and Faith D’Alusio, a photographer and writer, traveled the world collecting photos and stories about what people eat in a day. They documented the meager meals of a Masai goat herder during a drought, the fast-food diet of an American long-haul trucker and a veritable feast of lamb kebabs and other foods set out by an Iranian bread baker. Meanwhile, the Lens blog introduced 20 photos from a book called “Where Children Sleep”: Mr. Before Viewing What do the ordinary details of our daily lives say about who we are, where we’re from and what we care about? Questions
Blogging the National Day on Writing Elizabeth LeitzellA fifth-grade class at the Equity Project Charter School in New York City posted thoughts on #whyIwrite to Twitter on Monday through the class account, TEPTigers. Today is the National Day on Writing (yes, it’s a real thing), and we’ll be celebrating — and updating this post — all day long. Backstory: A couple of weeks ago, along with our wonderful collaborators, the National Writing Project, Figment and Edutopia, we started asking the world to post messages to Twitter today with the hashtag #whyIwrite. And post they have — even before today officially began. One of the most exciting moments for us so far was when author Neil Gaiman wrote just after midnight, “Because I can lie beautiful true things into existence, & let people escape from inside their own heads & see through other eyes. Of course, many, many schools and teachers have told us they’ll be there, posting, reading and writing back. Ms. At the College of St. 1:19 p.m. | Updated Wow! More later.
Sense, Sensibility and Sentences: Examining and Writing Memorable Lines Overview | What can a single sentence accomplish? In this lesson, students share favorite sentences, look closely at what makes them great, paraphrase them, then evaluate the results. They also work with sentences that are “mini-narratives” and write some of their own, before writing full-fledged short stories based on other students’ sentences. Materials | Student journals, computer with Internet access (optional), index cards. Warm-Up | Several days before teaching this lesson, ask students to spend the next few days on a hunt for excellent sentences, according to their own standards, which they will explain when they share. Tell them anything is fair game, including literature and one-liners from movies. On the day you start the lesson, have students each choose one or two of their sentences and write them on the board. Ask: Why does each sentence “work”? Next, tell students to choose any sentence on the board to paraphrase. Questions | For discussion and reading comprehension: