Welcome to Our Expanding Your Writing Skills, a Writing Activities for Kids Course

Course Sample for Expanding Your Writing Skills, a Writing Activities for Kids Course

Week One

Lesson One

Welcome to this nine-week fourth-grade writing class. We are going to have so much fun!

Did you know that you have been writing your whole life? It’s true. Even if you have never put a pen to paper or typed out a single word on a keyboard, you have been writing.

How?

To understand the answer to that question, you need to understand that writing is a process and that the first stage of that process is called pre-writing. Do you know what “pre-” means? It means “before.” So everything you have ever thought or said or done or experienced before you perform the act of writing (which is the second stage of the writing process) is part of the first stage of the process. Even if you have never written anything before, you have been in the first stage of the writing process your entire life. Maybe you have written before. Now you need to move to the next stage.

Maybe you have made up stories or written about other people’s stories or written to a friend about something that happened to you. In this class, you can learn how to be a better writer, and maybe you will produce a different kind of writing than you’ve ever written before.

In the next nine weeks, you will learn about the following kinds of writing:

• Comparison/contrast essays
• Book reviews
• Bibliographies
• Features (In this fun assignment, you will also learn how to conduct an interview.)
• Persuasive essays

And we will sharpen your skills for writing strong paragraphs and how to know when you have an appropriate amount of dialogue and description in your writing.

Are you ready to get started? Your first assignment is to make what I call an “Expert List.” Did you know you are an expert about a lot of things? It’s true! I want you to set a timer for five minutes. Within that time, write down as many different things as you can think of that you know a lot about (try to come up with at least twenty). Is it a certain video game? A TV show? Your best friend? Your siblings? Maybe you can play an instrument or a sport. Maybe you know a lot about your favorite book or hobby. The possibilities are endless. If you get to twenty and still have time left over, go ahead and write down more things until you run out of time. If you run out of time before you have twenty items, just reset the timer and keep going until you have at least twenty.

For most of this class, I will not ask you to do something without also doing it myself. So, on the next page are the items I was able to come up with in five minutes. You will see that I was able to list twenty-one items.

To view a full sample of this course, click here.