Welcome to Writing Workbook. This section of LitSite Workbooks is full of writing activities and exercises, contributed by educators, parents and students from around Alaska. It is divided into sections by grade level: The first section is applicable for use at Multiple Skill Levels including adult basic education. The subsequent exercises are grade-specific: The Elementary section is for beginning readers, and is further divided into Pre-School/Kindergarten, First through Third Grade, and Fourth through Sixth Grade. The Middle School section includes activities for Seventh through Ninth Grade, and High School for Tenth through Twelfth Grade.

Multiple Skill Levels
Including Applications for Adult Basic Education

Dictation Exercise
This exercise by Clifton Bates gives students the opportunity to hear and pay attention to the rhythm of a sentence, to learn about writing conventions, to listen to ideas related to other disciplines as well as to improve their handwriting and spelling.

Writing About Place
As part of her work in Antarctica, Alaskan Gretchen Legler developed a "Writing About Place" curriculum for use by Alaskan teachers of writing, or anyone interested in experimenting with different approaches to writing about the land.

The Dictionary Game
This exercise works especially well in writing groups or small writing classes. It's a writing exercise masquerading as a parlor game among friends.

Exercises in Discovering a Subject, Storytelling, and Nature Writing
Journalism professor and author Sherry Simpson passes on Annie Dillard's advice: Write about what frightens you and what fascinates you. She provides three exercises that call for doing just that.

Masked Writers at Mat-Su Alternative School
Students at Mat-Su Alternative School in Wasilla learn to write using masks, personal dictionaries and word etymology. The writing that burgeons from these high schoolers reflects innovative teaching that fosters student creativity.

Writing a Letter to an Author
Books can make us happy, but they can also frighten or anger us or spur us into action. This exercise helps students explore why they react the way they do to literature. It not only helps teach writing but it also helps teach students something about themselves.

Poetry Scavenger Hunt Exercise
This exercise focuses on sensory images and how they work in poetry and prose. It asks students to experience their environment in a new way and helps them find the precise words and phrases to express their feelings.

Elementary

Animal Body Exercise
Kindergartners in Kim Martin's class at Klatt Elementary School create their own book after reading The Mixed Up Chameleon by Eric Carle.

Books vs. Bytes Exercise
Alice Knapp, librarian at Chugach Optional Elementary in Anchorage, created this exercise to help children learn the different ways to do research, using both books and electronic resources.

Imaginary Zoos
In celebration of Dr. Seuss' birthday last year, Beverly Courtnage and her first grade class at Oceanview Elementary read "If I Ran the Zoo." She asked the children to design their own zoos with imaginary animals in them. Then they wrote about what they had drawn. They named their animals and described them, playing with the sounds of made up words.

Creative Writing Exercise -- Anchorage Reads Program
For this exercise, volunteer tutor Patricia Healy tells her student they are going to write a story together. She presents the beginning of a story with blanks for the child to fill in and asks him or her to describe various things.

Newspapers in Education -- Writing About News Photos
Tom Janz, administrator of the Newspaper in Education (N.I.E.) program for The Clarion newspaper, shows teachers how to use the newspaper to reinforce the reading, writing and thinking connection, getting students to use critical thinking while reading current stories about events in their own communities and the rest of the world.

We Make Masks!
The Third and Fourth grade Open Optional students at Willard Bowman Elementary in Anchorage studied the Yup'ik tradition of making masks. They created their own masks in clay, fired them, painted and trimmed them with feathers, beads, reed and raffia, and wrote stories about them.

Weavers of Words: Mask and Legend Exercise
Students create a story that integrates legends and mask making after brainstorming answers to the question, "Why do People Wear Masks?" The students also learn about myths, legends, and stories.

Writing Myths
This exercise familiarizes students with Raven myths and teaches them to differentiate between creation and trickster myths. The students are exposed to a storyteller and become storytellers themselves.

Write About a Pet
In this exercise, students learn to use details when they write about a pet -- a pet they have never owned. It can be the usual dog or cat, or it can be something fantastic, like a dragon or a flea.

Four Elementary Bilingual/ESL Exercises
Four exercises used in the Anchorage School District Bilingual and Multicultural Education Program represent a range of bilingual activities at the elementary level.

Creating a Newspaper Book Report
After choosing a book to report on, students write stories for their individual newspapers, some choosing to write their stories in their own voice (the student as editor and writer), and some in the voices of the characters from the book.

Middle School

Important Things, Classroom Book Project
Lauri Packebush and Toni Bassett use this exercise, in which students write about a precious object , to give them the opportunity to form a short, but serious and reflective piece of writing.

Writing With Traits
This exercise by Toni Bassett introduces students to the grading rubric used by the Anchorage School District’s standardized tests to judge writing samples. The exercise enables students to see what makes a great essay and where their own essay-writing strengths and weaknesses lie.

Newspapers in Education - Middle School Writing
Tom Janz provides a series of activities for getting middle school students to use critical thinking while reading current stories about events in their own communities and the rest of the world.

High School

Creation Myth Writing Exercise
Douglas Blankensop's students read and write a variety of world creation accounts including the Judeo Christian story in Genesis. After a paraphrase of the Genesis account and after reading the first half of "Hero with a Thousand Faces," students are given a handout and told to let their imagination run free.

Newspapers in Education - High School Writing
Tom Janz provides writing activities for high school students based on reading current stories about events in their own communities and the rest of the world.

Book Report Exercise
Joann Congdon's Book Report Exercise teaches characterization, dialogue, and the creation of conflict for dramatic effect in a fictional narrative. It also gives students practice in using quotation marks and parenthetical references, and in creating a bibliography.

Justice and Freedom Exercise
The exercise is a reproduction of actual orders delivered to Japanese Americans in 1942. It has been used in classrooms at East High School in Anchorage by Sally Carricaburu for a number of years. It is an excellent prompt for serious reflection and writing about the historical implications of WWII for Japanese-Americans in the U.S. (including Alaska) and the concepts of justice and freedom.

Exercises on Writing With Empathy
Andromeda Romano-Lax describes how she had students use observation, consider perspectives and examine bias to "get past the surface" and write about how other people might be thinking and feeling.

War Poem Lesson Plan
Students in Tracy Pulido's creative writing class at West Valley High School in Fairbanks wrote haikus and longer poems about the war in Iraq after reading newspaper and magazine articles on the war and studying fundamental elements of poems.

Cultural Adaptation of a Classic Play
Bethel Teacher Don Reardon's students created a modern version of a Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet, that utilized Yup'ik stories and culture as reflected in the Kuskokwim River Delta.