24 Authentic Writing Activities

Authentic Writing Ideas

1. Allow Choice
2. Create movie trailers that highlight universal themes or questions raised in novels
3. Dramatic Reading and Analysis of a poem of choice
4. Team research on a global social issue, provide possible solutions and present to the class/community
5. Group or individual research on essential question and selection of images to illustrate the concept or the absence of the quality presented in an online slideshow
6. Choose photo that represents their individual personality, value, beliefs etc. –write a personal narrative, poem …
7. Choose a newspaper article on a crime committed, turn it into a story. (Patchett’s Bel Canto)
8. Podcasts
9. Write commercials/ads of products, services you use, using knowledge of rhetoric
10. Read digital fiction, write your own - http://wetellstories.co.uk/
11. Choose article from the satiric publication The Onion and identify the elements of satire ( exagerration, incongruity, reversal and parody) http://www.theonion.com/content/index
12. Follow Twitter logs of a variety of newspapers and compare these logs for the differences and similarities in how they report the events. Speculate on the significance of these comparisons
13. My Future Research/Personal essays – careers, salaries, education/training, employment outlook etc.. Create graphic organizers comparing 3 – 5 possible careers. Write short personal essays explaining what your life would look like if you pursued each choice.
14. Using a few famous speeches (ex. Obama’s and GW’s inaugurations speeches) create a “word cloud” representing the frequency of word use, the more frequent the word, the larger it is displayed. Analyze the visual representation and evaluate the prominent words and the intention of the writer. Extension – do this to one of your own persuasive pieces of writing. http://www.wordle.net/
15. Research a current economic or social proposal that is important to you. Prepare a written argument to persuade your classmates to support this proposal.
16. Poetry Cafes/Poetry Slams
17. Follow a variety of blogs to educate yourself on a topic of personal interest. Write a reflection on the differences in tone, content, expertise, between these blogs and the insights you gained from these blogs.
18. Translate a section of dialogue from a Shakespeare play into a series of text messages or tweets etc. Then analyze the effect the writing mode has on the tone and meaning of the dialogue along with audience and purpose using this media.
19. After reading several short stories, rank each story according to the elements of effective short stories. Justify your rankings.
20. Word trees to reveal recurrent themes and phrases in pieces of writing. Many Eye’s Word Tree - http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Word_Tree.html
21. Write a narrative and illustrate with images using an Internet site such as Voice Thread.com - http://voicethread.com/#home
22. Create a graphic novel/comic strip of a short story or novel.
23. Epals –choose a project, colloborate with students in other countries, http://www.epals.com/
24. Create a Facebook page for your favorite character

Resource:

National Council of Teachers of English

http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/documents/21st_century_skills_english_map.pdf