Showing Results for story starters writers

This literature lesson guides kids towards a deeper understanding of second grade texts through an exploration of character, setting, and plot. Kids will be challenged to answer the who, what, where, when and why of a story, in addition to determining the story's message. Two versions of the same story will be presented in order for second graders to see story elements in action.

Third grade writers will be tasked with writing longer and more complicated sentences. This guided lesson in understanding, constructing and punctuating sentences can support kids as they learn to build bigger and better sentences in their writing. Grammar instruction and practical examples were written by our curriculum experts, complete with a list of recommended building sentence worksheets for third graders.

As students become more sophisticated writers, they begin to understand that words have different “jobs” in a sentence. These jobs can be thought of as parts of speech. In this word study unit, students will learn about the work that transition words, prepositions, verbs, adverbs and adjectives do. Students will also explore how certain kinds of words work together, like verbs and adverbs.

The mysterious comma is arguably the trickiest form of punctuation, which is why assigned it it’s own unit in 5th grade. As students become more sophisticated writers they craft more complex sentences. They incorporate independent phrases and clauses, generate compound sentences, and utilize transition words to combine ideas - and the exercises in this unit will teach them how to use commas correctly in each scenario.

Words work together in a sentence, each one performing a different task. By fifth grade, students have become more adept readers and writers and they are familiar with the basic parts of speech. The activities in this unit revisit some of the basics and also add depth to their existing understanding. Students will engage in such topics as superlative adjectives, correlative conjunctions and prepositional phrases, to name a few.

Second grade writers often need extra support with the rules of capitalization, puncuation, apostrophes, and proper nouns. The exercises in this guided lesson cover these four key grammar rules, and provide kids with targeted exercises to help them practice writing with correct grammar usage. To help gain even more practice with new writing skills, download and print the capitalization and punctuation worksheets suggested as part of this lesson.

In this unit, students are encouraged to write letters to family and friends about a book they are reading. In the letters the will apply the skills learned in this unit, including how to structure a letter, punctuating titles of books and short stories, using possessives (in reference to the characters or ideas in the book), contractions and addressing an envelope. Don’t forget to request a response - getting a personal letter in the mail in this electronic age can be a thrill!