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Hi,

Here's are some ideas that I like to pass along:

One of my favourite writing activities (which can be adapted to virtually any theme you've decided to go with) is to have the children complete an add-a-sentence story. You can do this in a variety of ways: One way would be to have all the students write the same sentence on the top of a sheet of paper.

Another way would be for you to write a different sentence on the top of each sheet of paper and hand them out to the students.

A third way would be to have the students write their own starting sentence.

All you need to do is have the students write one sentence and pass their paper to the next person. Then, when a student gets a paper, he or she reads the story and adds a sentence. Once everyone has their own paper back they can read the stories aloud to the class. This is a great activity because it involves reading, writing, speaking.

I also like putting the class in teams and playing games against the clock to add excitement to the task.

For example, check out this fun idea for small classes. This exact example was given to me by one of my customers who is using and adapting my games.

Have your pupils start about 4 feet from their "a/an" worksheet. Have three rows with 16 words in each row. On the desk where the children start they have a piece of lined paper. Have pencils at both ends so that they aren't running with them. The words in the list should be words you have already introduced and had some speaking practise with. On "Go" the pupils run from their desk to the worksheet and write the appropriate "a" or "an" in front of the word. They then run back to their respective desks and write it out in full. For example if they put down "an" in front of egg, then they run back and write, "an egg". The fastest person with the highest accuracy is the winner.

Of course you can play down the competitive element, and with the younger students, don't let them get so frusterated over the competition that they aren't learning from the game.

This idea can be adapted to all sorts of writing ideas – spelling, fill in the blanks, verb endings…anything as long as it does not involve writing out long sentences.