Sometimes students are asked to write about literature. May of my students didn’t really know where to start, or what was included in a book review. After looking at some reviews written by kids (click here to browse one of many child-authored book review sites), I used this book review prewriting sheet to help my students know some things they could include in their book review.
Click to download the Literature Review Prewriting sheet.
My students were notorious for turning in incomplete writing assignments. They would forget to include the rough draft or outline or something. So I created this easy page to run of on a colored sheet of paper and cut into fourths. My students were required to attach this submission sheet to the front of any writing assignment and fill it out. This helped in numerous ways:
Click here to download:
Teachers are responsible for so many aspects of a student’s life- not just the academics. It’s helpful to give students an opportunity periodically to tell you whatever is on their mind. However, some students will tell you they don’t have anything to say. So here’s my solution:
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| To get this poster, right click on it and select “save image as.” Then you can save it to your computer and resize it before you print it. I printed mine on a regular 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of card stalk. |
I print this page up at the beginning of the year (to save time writing up the prompt multiple times), and put it on the board about 4 times a year as an in-class writing assignment. One year, I had a particularly social group of 6th grade girls and there always seemed to be some dramatic catastrophe going on between them {sigh}. I chose to do this writing assignment during one particularly dramatic episode and it turned out to be very helpful for me as their teacher to hear about what’s going on without “prying into their lives.”
Compare and contrast essays are one of the most common writing assignments on standardized tests. I found it helpful to have an organizer for my students. Having specific questions that prompt students about what to write in each part was especially helpful for my ESL kids. Here’s the one I used for our social studies unit on world religions (research and compare/contrast 2 world religions):
Some of my students struggled with the concept of general vs. specific. After a mini-lesson on the difference (including common vs. proper nouns), we used this worksheet to practice. NOTE: The example is not done for you. This is for you to use in your mini-lesson and transition to independent/partner practice. Enjoy!
So many of the important assessments students face nowadays require competent writing. I used the end of the year as a chance to reinforce basic paragraph construction with this yearbook. I created pages on Microsoft Word (feel free to change the pages or add your own) that focused on specific aspects of our school year. For example, we had a grade-level Olympics in conjunction with our study of ancient civilizations, so I included a page that focused on this fun event. This was a great way to help students review the things they’d learned during the year. This would be very easy to modify for younger grades.
As a class, we made a checklist of the tasks required to complete the yearbook (each student copied down the list). Each student was required to write a rough draft on regular notebook paper, and have a peer edit it before they could go on to the final draft. Once the checklists were made, the students were free to work on whatever page they wanted. Each student completed the entire list, but could choose which page to work on each time we started working. This entire project took my 6th graders about 2.5 – 3 weeks to complete (45 min- 1 hour a day). One parent had taken pictures of school events (like track & field day and our Shakespeare play) and generously printed some of them for us. Each student ended up with 2-3 pictures from the year to glue into their book. I suppose you could encourage students to bring in a picture or two to glue in if they wanted. The students especially enjoyed signing each others’ yearbooks once they were all completed (we added a few blank pages at the end for autographs and messages).
Here are the Word files if you want to download them:
Yearbook Cover
Shakespeare Play page
Mathematics page
Medieval Day page
Guided reading page
Olympics page
Favorite Things page
Project Requirements
Writing page
Science page
Teachers page
Lunch & Recess page
Friends page
*When I uploaded these files, my cute fonts, didn’t get uploaded, so you might want to change them on your own computer to make them more interesting.
2022 Note: I’ve had some people message me that some of the pages aren’t downloading from Google Drive where they’re uploaded. I’m sorry, and I’ll do my best to figure out the issue.
What are some of your favorite end of the year projects/activities?
Squarehead Teachers 