Description | Exposition | Narration | Opinion | Persuasion | All
Give your middle school students something intriguing to write about, whether they are reluctant, eager, or somewhere inbetween.
Free printables for how to create a paragraph, free tutorials on proofreading or in-text citations, current events, asking what they would read to a dog {and other important opinions}, story writing, and much more—you’ll find it all here.
Looking for engaging prompts for your teens? You’ll find those here. >>
Interested in writing prompts for the whole family? Could you use an assortment of prompts bundled together for certain topics or for varying grade levels? Free tutorials and printables included. Find them all here. >>
Thanks for visiting the Middle School Prompts page. If you have a prompt you would like to submit, please contact Sharon Watson.
Writing Is Better When . . .
Writing is hard. My students tell me this, and I believe them.
Writing makes their hands hurt. They don’t know what to write or how to write it. They have trouble coming up with topics. They’ll write if someone gives them a topic they are interested in. Or if someone gives them a topic, they don’t want to write.
Can you identify with any of these? If so, let’s make it easier on you.
Writing tip: When you are writing, be aware of your environment.
What do I mean by that? I mean be a detective and find out where you like to write and what you like around you when you write. Do you enjoy being in a room full of people, your favorite pet, or solid quiet when you write? Would you rather be at a desk . . . or slouched in the beanbag in the corner? (more…)
Never Do the Following
Rules, rules, rules! You find them everywhere.
I even found some in a guide book to a Florida vacation area.
But these weren’t strictly rules. They were more like advice. In Emerald Coast Guide, I found all sorts of advice and things to avoid.
Quirky Beach Rules
For instance, in their “NEVER do the following” column, they mention some obvious things and some funny things: (more…)
Write a Story from an Animal’s Perspective
How do you write a story about Alaska before people arrived? You make animals the main characters, which is exactly what James A. Michener does in Alaska.
Michener creates Matriarch, a mammoth that is old enough to be the grandmother of many other mammoths. Through her eyes, we see the landscape and experience the early troubles of the area now known as Alaska.
An Alaskan Matriarch
Here’s a passage from Alaska in which Matriarch first encounters . . . well, I think you’ll figure out what’s going on here: (more…)
Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month with this Family Writing Prompt
Let’s celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month by highlighting a short story by Colombian-born Gabriel García Márquez.
Many stories can be put into one of two categories when talking about how the ball gets rolling: (more…)
Fire Prevention Day—Narrowing Down a SubjectTopic
Note: This is part one of the Intro to Writing series. Find links to the other tutorials here.
What do you do when your teacher gives you a subject to write about, but that subject is too broad?
For instance, what if your teacher says, “Write about natural disasters”? Right off the bat, you know you are in trouble. That subject is too large; there are too many possibilities. It would take a few books to cover everything, and your essay is due in two days. (more…)
Become a Poet
Has your sports team ever lost a game? And did you write about it in a poem?
You didn’t?
Well, Ernest Thayer did in the now-famous poem “Casey at the Bat.” You can read the history of the poem and the poem itself here.
October 2 is National Poetry Day, and recently the theme was “Remembering,” in which amateur and famous poets write to remember a special moment or a meaningful time in their lives. (more…)
Proofreading Marks and How to Use Them
Do your students waste endless time erasing whole sentences? Do they become discouraged when they look at their rough drafts filled with arrows, illegible notes in the margins, and ugly lines of scratched-out writing?
Let’s save them the pain by teaching them these handy, easy-to-use proofreading marks.
I’ve watched students in my writing classes scratch out whole sentences and rewrite them. They draw lines through words. They burn up their papers and crumble their erasers just to change something.
This is totally unnecessary.
There’s an easier—and quicker—way to proofread that doesn’t require a lot of rewriting, which should be good news to our students.
But first, the other grammar tutorials
This is the last in a series of tutorials on grammar. In this one, you and your students will learn how to use these helpful proofreading marks.
If you’re dying to know what the other grammar tutorials are about, click here for one on punctuation in dialog. (Tarzan and Jane help out on that one.) Click here if you yearn to know how to handle commas in compound sentences with coordinating conjunctions.
And click here for the hard-hitting exposé on where to put the comma, period, colon, or semicolon when using quotation marks. Here’s a tutorial on a question I suspect you’ve heard from your students about using question marks and exclamation points with end quotation marks (you know, do they go inside or outside?).
For the tutorial revealing the crazy fact that the word “everyone” is singular, click here. And to finally put to rest your students’ confusion about it’s/its, you’re/your, and others of that ilk, click here.
Proofreading Marks
As with all the other tutorials, you get a super-duper package today: an infographic to teach the proofreading marks, an example of how to use them in a real paragraph, an exercise so students can fix someone else’s mistakes, and the answers. (more…)
