debbie oestreicher's List: Language Arts - Writing

Tikatok is a great website to excite your students about writing. With Tikatok each of your students can become a published author, create, share, and gain an authentic audience for their writing and illustrations, and receive writing support through the StorySparks system. StorySparks are a framework that gives students prompts at the bottom of their screen as they are writing their story. They are tips such as “the beginning of the story is where we define a setting, where does your story take place?” StorySparks come in different levels depending on your student ability. Using Tikatok, students can build literacy skills such as: writing, story structure, reading, comprehension, imagination, creativity, character development, story development, critical thinking, organization, drafting, and technology skills (typing, uploading

Pic Lits is a really neat creative writing site that provides pictures and a word bank for students to create a enriched sentence or sentences about the picture. “The object is to put the right words in the right place and the right order to capture the essence, story, and meaning of the picture.” Students can choose to only drag words from the word bank to create their sentence or compose a sentence freestyle.

MixedInk is used by students, employees, fans, activists, political & community groups, unions, citizen journalists... pretty much any group with an opinion.Together, people write op-eds & letters to the editor, text for petitions, mission statements, questions & comments for politicians & stars, news articles, blog posts, and lots more. MixedInk is a free and democratic collaborative writing tool. With MixedInk, any group can weave their best ideas and opinions together to collectively write.

Magnetic Poetry is a virtual edition of magnetic fridge poetry. Students can choose from four kits to create their ‘magnetic’ poem. There is Kids Kit, First Words, Best Friends, and Storymaker. After students have chosen a kit they can choose from three backgrounds for their poetry (refrigerator, locker, or whiteboard). Students are given a virtual tub of words to choose from that they can drag, arrange, and rearrange to create a poem or story. When they are finished, students can send their Magnetic Poetry to an email address or save it for later viewing on the site.

Telescopic Text is a very simple website that could be very handy in the language arts classroom. The site starts off with a very simple sentence: I made tea. Each time you click on a word, the sentence expands adding adjectives, adverbs, and makes the sentence more interesting. Use Telescopic Text to teach your students about creative, descriptive writing and how to improve writing with descriptive words. Compare and contrast what students knew about the sentence “I made tea.” at the beginning and how each addition of words helped them understand more about the original statement. This can be done as a whole class using an interactive whiteboard or a computer with a projector. Students can take turns clicking on words to expand the statement with discussion after each addition. This is a great exercise to use before writing. Have the students write their own simple sentence and expand it into a story with the addition of descriptive words.

Create your own magazine cover

With the popularity of blogging and online journals, writers working in the online realm have a growing number of opportunities all the time to practice and refine their craft, and maybe even get paid for it. And if you're a writing major, why not take advantage of all the opportunities to get great free and open source resources that can help you to write, edit and organize your work? Here's a list of fifty open source tools that you can use to make your writing even better.

Scribd is the largest social publishing company in the world — the website where more than 60 million people each month discover and share original writings and documents. Scribd’s vision is to liberate the written word — to turn everyone into a publisher and create the best possible reading experience on the web and mobile platforms.

These Wacky Web Tales are geared for grades 3 and above. (Think Mad Libs)

The Adjective Game for Kids
promoting word choice with younger writers

A step by step guide to launching your writing career

Persuasive writing is an important skill that cannot be taught too early. But writing an argument can seem intimidating to elementary students. This lesson encourages students to use skills and knowledge they may not realize they already have. A classroom game introduces students to the basic concepts of lobbying for something that is important to them (or that they want) and making persuasive arguments. Students then choose their own persuasive piece to analyze and learn some of the definitions associated with persuasive writing. Once students become aware of the techniques used in oral arguments, they then apply them to independent persuasive writing activities.

Argument & Persuasive Writing
Lesson plans and teaching resources

This free online application is designed to help students in grades 5-12 write an online persuasive essay.

Essays to Write
for Early Writers

Learn the parts of a letter, and how to write your own