Funning Up a Skills Challenge

Practicing or testing writing skills does not have to be boring. There are so many ways to mix things up and keep them interesting.  

This past week in the journalism class I am mentoring I wanted to cover fact and opinion as well as punctuation, capitalization, and a few other skills. In honor of it being Halloween week, I created an activity that combined all of that with some festive flair.

I wrote several statements about spiders, some fact and some opinion. I wrote them with all sorts of mistakes that needed to be fixed. I set the statements around the room and added cobwebs and spider rings. Then I gave each student a glow stick and turned out the lights. (It was darker in the room than the photos show.) Statements were read by light of personal glow sticks; students had to determine if the statement was a fact or an opinion, and rewrite it with correct punctuation, etc. When everyone was done, we turned the lights back on and went over the statements and reviewed rules for writing together.

Keeping it fun and fresh!