Find Great Collaborative Writing Projects

Each student contributes a page to this collaborative class yearbook, ensuring no special memory is overlooked. Students add their thoughts, memories, pictures, and narrations from the school year for various categories (Favorite Lesson, Best Field Trip, Best Class Moment, etc...). To expand this class yearbook to be a grade-level yearbook, invite other teachers in your grade to your StoryJumper class so their students can contribute, too. As each classroom adds their content to the grade-level yearbook, students get a more complete representation of the year.

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Divide and conquer with jigsaw research. Break up those bulky research projects into smaller sections. Each student is responsible for being an expert of a different subtopic - researching, drafting, publishing, and teaching their peers. By the end, students contribute their learnings to a final group book and are knowledgeable about an entire topic.

A pen pal from another time and place! At the culmination of each lesson within a topic, each student becomes a character from that time and place, develops a voice and back story, and writes to their pen pal (in a different classroom) describing key events and the impact on their life. Pen pals respond back and forth, considering different perspectives, until the unit is complete in this creative way to summarize learning and empathize with others.

Students work in groups. Like popcorn popping and bouncing around, one student starts a story and then hands it off to another student to continue. Frequent changing of hands allows for fun and surprising shifts in the story. This continues until a target number pages are completed (e.g. 16).

Online diary entries, written from the perspective of a person at a specific time in history, is the perfect way for students to understand, internalize, and summarize their learning. Students have the opportunity to empathize and develop a voice and identity for their character as they keep this diary throughout the project. They can bring their historical character to life by adding their voice to their online diary.

Present the pros and cons of an issue, side by side. Working with a partner and using a two page spread, one student presents their argument and the other student presents their counter argument on the opposite page. This continues until all arguments and counter arguments have been made. Students now have a more visual way to see both sides of a given issue.

This project provides a fun and engaging review opportunity and is flexible for any topic or subject. Working with a partner, one student writes a summary or narrative about what they've learned and then passes it to their partner who illustrates it. Students alternate writing and illustrating, reviewing content and solidifying learning as they go.

In this collaborative "mindhive" activity, students contribute their unique experiences, knowledge, and insight, helping to build a more complete picture of a given subject or their previous learning.

Memory tricks and visual cues are a great way to retain information. Students identify the key learnings from a recent lesson and draw a visual image, comic, mneumonic, etc... to help remember them later. Students upload their drawings to a shared class book, allowing all students to use this collaborative book as a study aid and review tool.

Students work in groups of 2. Given a topic, each partner independently writes a 9 line poem. Then each group works together to create one poem incorporating all 18 lines from the partners' poems. Finally, narrate the poems online with a focus on fluency and expression.