CCSS ELA Standard: 5.W.5

Let's take a starting phrase about St. Patrick's Day and get specific. No, even more specific!

Let's make this simile about a strong uncle even more specific.

Students will make this slimy broccoli simile seriously specific.

Let's make this simile about a quick baby even more specific.

Let's make this simile about a loud class super specific!

Students will make this simile about stinky seaweed super specific.

Students will create a pretty darn interesting poem about Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons.

Students will create a surprisingly good poem based on Monet's Impression, Sunrise.

Pi can go beyond circles! What if you wrote using the digits of pi as your guide?

Get your students writing some pretty darn impressive poetry based on Japan's most famous artist.

Students will look closely at a piece of art and then write a structured poem about it.

Students will write about a beautiful painting from Frederic Edwin Church.

Let's start with "As cold as fire."

What if we started a sentence with the simile?

Can your students help The Bard? We'll fix five Shakespearean run-ons in three different ways.

A specific technique to help students add some spice to their writing. We'll be writing sentences with three dependent clauses.

A specific technique to help students add some spice to their writing. We'll be contrasting two ideas using synonyms.

A specific technique to help students add some spice to their writing. We'll be using antonyms to describe the same topic!

Rather than just demand that students "write clearly," we'll explore the hazards of poorly written sentences… and maybe create one of our own!

Is your students' use of repetition limited to, "The girl was very, very, very fast."? Let's borrow some ideas from Shakespeare!

In this lesson, students will not just fix passive sentences, but break active sentences as they learn to put the star of the sentence first.

We'll show students how to add more variety to their writing by starting sentences with gerunds, participle phrases, and absolute phrases.

We'll show students how to add more variety to their writing by starting sentences with a reason, a prepositional phrase, and a simile.

"Add more variety!" I'd say to my class. But I never really knew what this actually meant. Suprise! This bad advice never improved students' writing. In these videos, students learn nine specific ways to add variety just by changing the beginning of their sentences. This was easily one of my students' favorite writing tools - because it actually helped them.

Did you ever notice that the structure of an essay is very similar to the structure of a paragraph? Hmm…