Show me, Don't tell me!

Over spring break I am taking some time to create some lessons that I will try out in different teacher's classrooms and share with others to try. One that I created is a writing web quest of sorts. As a fourth grade teacher in Texas for 5 years I know all too well that students struggle to explain themselves and what they are talking about. It is like pulling teeth when trying to get students to describe how they feel or what they think about something let alone to write those things down! I used the free website smore to create a flyer that includes a couple of activities to help students practice their writing skills.  Part of the lesson is to use the online activity from Scholastic called Story Starters where the students spin a wheel to randomly give them different ideas for a story.  The students will use this to give them ideas of things to describe.  Then at the end they can choose from 3 prompts to write a full story. Of course it can be adapted for any classroom but the idea would be to have the students type their story into their Google drive so it is automatically saved and can be easily shared with their teacher. This makes it easier for the teacher to keep track of student work and helps students and teachers get use to using technology in their daily class work.  Activities like this are simple to make and will help make your lessons more interactive instead of you doing all of the talking all of the time.  You can find the lesson on my Web Quest page on this website, or you can go directly to the flyer here.