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.
