DPI Writing Strategies
Created through a partnership with the N.C. Department of Public Instruction.
Resources created by DPI Writing Strategies
Records 1–20 of 35 displayed: go to page 1, 2
- Action chains
- Students learn to elaborate on an event in a narrative by expanding their sentences into action chains. Expanding single actions into an action chain provides the reader with a more detailed picture of an event in a narrative.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 3–5 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Adding emotions to your story
- One way to make stories even better is to show emotions and not just tell them. In this lesson, students will use actions, gestures, and facial expressions to act out emotions.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 3–5 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Appositive action
- Appositives are descriptive phrases, set off by commas, that modify a noun or noun phrase. Using appositives helps writers create sentences that are smoother and less choppy. In this lesson, students will learn to combine 2 or more descriptive sentences and action sentences into one sentence with an appositive phrase.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 3–5 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Awesome action words
- Good writers use precise verbs to make stories interesting and vivid. In this lesson, students will learn to replace boring, redundant, generic verbs with more precise “Awesome Action Words.”
- Format: lesson plan (grade 3–4 English Language Arts and English Language Development)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Be the sentence: An interactive language arts activity
- Students take on the roles of different words and punctuation and work collaboratively to create a complete sentence using correct parts of speech, word order, and punctuation. Students progress from simple sentences to more complex sentences.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 3–4 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Description as mind control: Using details to help readers visualize your story
- Good writers help their readers visualize their stories by including vivid details. Students will listen to passages from Gary Paulsen's novel Hatchet, draw one of the images from the passage, and identify which details Paulsen uses to create these images.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 3–5 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Discovering just the right word
- Precise word choice helps show the reader a story and not just tell a story. The purpose of this series of lessons is to help students improve their writing style by strengthening word choice at the word and sentence level by adding adverbs, precise verbs, and specific nouns.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 4 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- First draft/final draft
- Students will compare paragraphs with and without elaboration and descriptive details. They will learn how to revise their own writing by adding descriptive details such as adjectives, adverbs, concrete nouns, and precise verbs.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 3–5 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Getting paragraphing down P-A-T
- One way to remember when to indent and begin a new paragraph is when (P) the place changes, (A) the action changes, and (T) the time changes (P-A-T). In this lesson, students will learn how to identify appropriate places to indent new paragraphs in their writing.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 3–4 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Great beginnings
- Good beginnings hook readers and make them want to continue reading. Students will learn the features of good beginnings by reading the beginnings of several narrative picture books and then writing good beginnings for their own narratives.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 4 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Great endings
- Sometimes authors end their stories with a memory, a feeling, a wish, or a hope. Other times they end the story by referring back to the language of the beginning. In this lesson, students will examine the characteristics of good endings by reading good endings of narrative picture books. They will then practice writing good endings for their own narratives.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 2–4 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Little Bit - BIG BIT - Little Bit
- This lesson helps students who tend to jump right in and tell their entire story in the first few sentences and then struggle to complete their story. Students will learn to start and end their stories with just a "Little Bit" about the setup and closure of the story.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 2–4 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Meanwhile...: Transition words that connect ideas
- Students will identify transition words in picturebooks that they can use in their own writing. Transition words are the glue that holds sentences and paragraphs together. They signal that this is a new part of the story.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 3–5 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Mumbling together
- "Mumbling together" is a strategy students can use to edit their own writing and develop an ear for correct language. Students learn to proofread by reading their first drafts aloud to identify left-out words and other errors.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 1–4 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Narrowing the focus: What's the main event?
- In this lesson, students will learn how to narrow the focus of their personal narrative down to one main event by selecting a more specific title. Good stories are focused on one topic or main event. The reader should be able to tell the most important thing that the story is about. Instead of writing a story about a whole vacation that describes many events, it is a good strategy to write a story about one thing that happened on the vacation - one main event.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 2–4 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Plain Polly: Adding relevant details
- This instructional technique creates a lasting visual image of how relevant details help develop a character and a focus. Students learn to add only details that are related to the main idea of a “Plain Polly” stick figure. These mascots serve as reminders to students to be selective with the details they use to support their main idea.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 3–4 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Read it backwards
- One editing technique that writers can use to help them catch their own spelling errors is "Read It Backwards." In this lesson, students will learn a procedure for identifying and correcting the spelling of misspelled words.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 2–4 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Sentence carousel
- Adjectives, adverbs, and precise language help construct descriptive sentences. In this lesson, students will learn to construct more elaborate sentences that will enliven their writing
- Format: lesson plan (grade 3–4 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Sentence combining
- This lesson is designed for students who write short choppy sentences. Students will learn to combine short choppy sentences that develop their ideas and involve the reader in the action of the story.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 3–4 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
- Sentence elaboration with prepositional phrases
- This lesson is designed for students who write short choppy sentences. In this lesson, students will learn how to write more elaborated, complex sentences by adding prepositional phrases and clauses.
- Format: lesson plan (grade 3–5 English Language Arts)
- By DPI Writing Strategies.
