5 Great Activities from Read Write Think

If you're an elementary school teacher who has not bookmarked Read Write Think, you absolutely should do that today. Read Write Think produces and shares a wealth of outstanding materials and lesson plans for elementary school language arts lessons. Five of their great, free resources are featured below.

Cube Creators provide templates designed to break the writing process into six distinct parts. There are templates for writing biographies, mysteries, short stories, and a blank template that you can customize. Students enter the required information into the online template. When the template is completed, it can be printed with lines for cutting and folding to create an actual cube.

Story Map is a free interactive story planning tool from Read Write Think. Story Maps provides four templates for outlining stories. To use the templates students title their stories then choose one of four templates to outline their stories. The four template choices are conflict, setting, character, and resolution. Students can print their completed templates.

Read Write Think's Trading Card Creator on the web offers the same creation features that are found in the iPad app of the same name. I used the web version of the Trading Card Creator to create an Abraham Lincoln trading card. To create the card I found a public domain image of Lincoln, uploaded it to the template provided by RWT, and completed the fields that asked for information about Lincoln's life. When my card was completed I was able to download it to my computer. I could have also emailed it to myself or to a friend. 

Word Mover is another nice, free iPad app from Read Write Think. The app is designed to help students develop poems and short stories. When students open the Word Mover app they are shown a selection of words that they can drag onto a canvas to construct a poem or story. Word Mover provides students with eight canvas backgrounds on which they can construct their poems. If the word bank provided by Word Mover doesn’t offer enough words they can add their own words to the word bank.