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3rd and 4th Grade Writing Strategies Lesson Plans

Help your students absorb the details of a text and make inferences about what they read with the strategy of close reading. By reading closely, students will become better able to understand complex themes and nuances in a text.

Close Reading: Introduction

In this lesson, students will use their creativity, a graphic organizer, and a fun story to learn about character analysis.  

It’s All in the Personality: Character Traits

Expose your students to the wonderful genre of drama, but be sure to teach them the important key terms so they understand the structure. Use this as a stand alone lesson or a pre-lesson for the *Putting a Play Together!* lesson.

Parts of a Drama

Nourish your child's inner writer with this lesson on three different forms of literature: poetry, prose, and drama. After going through some examples of each, students will demonstrate their knowledge by filling out bubble maps.

Poetry, Prose, and Drama, Oh My!

Students will have a blast turning a reading passage into a Reader's Theater skit. This lesson teaches them to use dialogue to help readers understand the experiences of different characters.

Action! Students Create Reader's Theater

Change is inevitable, even for story characters! In this lesson, your students will determine how a character changes throughout a story by focusing on the character’s dialogue and actions.

Characters Change Just Like We Do

In this lesson, students will engage in inquiry, a powerful mindfulness practice to work with judgements about oneself and others.

Making Judgements: Is it True?

Young writers will learn to manipulate and combine sentences with conjunctions and adverb phrases. This skill helps students understand that crafting sentences is a creative and artistic process. 

Sentence Scramble

Give your class the "write" tools they need to become excellent authors. In this literary lesson, students use their knowledge of author's purpose to successfully write pieces that persuade, inform, and entertain.

Author's Purpose: Easy as PIE

There is great wonder in building things and taking them apart. Use this grammar lesson with your students to teach them how to construct and deconstruct contractions while correctly using an apostrophe.

Construct and Deconstruct Contractions

This lesson challenges young learners to add dialogue to their writing. Students will love using their creativity to write personal narratives. 

Narrative Writing: Adding Dialogue

Every great reader and writer knows that syntax matters. During this lesson, students will use the close reading strategy to focus on word choice, and use their understanding of syntax to develop theories about patterns in the text.

Close Reading Through Word Choice

Students often understand the basic conventions of writing, but may need support in incorporating these skills into their work. In this lesson, students will review some of the more common capitalization and punctuation errors and apply their editing skills to real writing.

Editing for Capitalization and Punctuation

Students become word artists as they use ordinary pictures to practice creating detailed descriptions. This technique helps your class learn how to paint a picture with words.

Paint a Word Picture

Teach young authors how to "hook" readers with this hands-on lesson. By examining novels and developing their own introductions, students will be able to hone their writing skills.

Interesting Introductions

This lesson will have your EL students exploring characters&#39; dialogue and actions to determine their personality traits! Use it on its own or as a support lesson.

Discovering Character Traits

Teach young writers some commonly used strategies to pace their narrative writing. Students will learn to use formatting, dialogue, and description to speed up or slow down their piece. 

Pacing Strategies

What if Cinderella’s stepsisters weren’t really evil? In this engaging lesson, you will introduce your students to multiple points of view and discuss how these different perspectives can change a reader’s experience.

Whose Point Is It Anyway?

Students will have a blast creating their own cartoons and comics. This lesson provides an engaging method to help students demonstrate the use of quotation marks when writing.

Who Said It?

Create conversations about character changes! Use this lesson plan as a stand-alone lesson for practicing sequencing words in evidenced-based claims about a character, or before the Characters Change Just Like We Do lesson.

Evidence of Character Changes


Similes, metaphors, and idioms are some of the most widely used literary devices in both speaking and writing. Students will review each of these and practice creating some of their own. 


Similes, Metaphors, and Idioms of Figurative Language

Help your ELs identify the characters and their dialogue in a story. This lesson can stand alone or be used as a pre-lesson for the *Action! Students Create Reader’s Theater* lesson.

Characters and Dialogue

Figurative language can be difficult, especially for ELs. With the help of context clues and exposure to common idioms, it can be a piece of cake! Use this as a stand-alone lesson or as a pre-lesson for the *Take a Walk with Idioms* lesson.

Working with Idioms

Once students have selected a topic related to a piece of literature they have read and mapped out their argument, this lesson will help them turn their prewriting into an essay. 

Literary Argument: Drafting Your Essay

Holy cow! Did President George W. Bush really have a longhorn named Ofelia as a pet? Students learn about wacky White House pets in this fun research activity that includes “president interviews” and a pet choice writing page.

Presidential Pets

Let’s put it all together! In this lesson, students will explore the different parts of a drama or play. By the end of the lesson they will be able to define terminology related to plays and give examples of the unique genre features!

Putting a Play Together!

If young writers can learn how to write a solid paragraph, then they have the building blocks of an essay. In this lesson, students will study paragraph structure and practice organizing ideas into paragraphs.  

Paragraphs That POP!

So your students are going to write a narrative? Use these prewriting exercises to help them choose an idea and plan out their story.  

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English Language Support

3rd and 4th Grade Writing Strategies Lesson Plans