5th Grade Writing Lesson Plans

The hardest part of writing an essay can be the first few steps. This lesson and accompanying graphic organizers will help students map out their ideas and practice crafting paragraphs. With this support, your writers will be off and running!

This is a lesson about the immigration procedures at Ellis Island. Students will learn about the process and creatively write about what it was like for immigrants to pass through Ellis Island.

Students often understand the basic conventions of writing, but may need support in incorporating these skills into their work. In this lesson, students will review some of the more common capitalization and punctuation errors and apply their editing skills to real writing.

Up, up, and away! It's Peter Pan vs. Wendy vs. John in this reading comprehension lesson. Using the Peter Pan and Neverland workbook, students will use text excerpts and comprehension questions to write an essay comparing main characters.

Goodbye London, hello Neverland. In this lesson, students will complete the final pages of their Peter Pan and Neverland workbooks by taking a more in-depth look at Peter's full character and what possibilities Neverland might hold.

Challenge students with a discussion about prepositions and conjunctions in this lesson. Your class will write a journal entry to explain the function of the prepositions and conjunctions in a specific sentence.

Every name has a story behind it. This lesson allows students to share the story of their name with their classmates. Not only is it fun, it's ideal for establishing a respectful classroom community.

Start a dialogue around area models! In this lesson, encourage students to ask questions as they multiply using area models. Use this lesson on its own or as support to the lesson Area Models and Multiplication.

Quoting is a valuable skill in today's education. Lead your students on the right path with explicit instruction that will stick. Then, back it up with hands on practice on and experience in their own leveled chapter books.

Bram Stoker's Dracula has inspired feelings of fear and morbid curiosity for over a century. With this lesson plan, your students will get a taste of the literary work while learning about the myth behind vampires.

This experiment is a fun lesson that captures the ears, eyes, and minds of students! It combines writing, reasoning, predictions, and teamwork with candies and soda to produce a memorable lesson on chemical reactions and energy.

Give your class a deeper understanding of theme with this art and poetry-focused lesson plan about theme. By the end of the lesson, students will understand what theme is and how to determine theme in a piece of writing, such as a poem.

Your students will surely exclaim, "This is fun!" in response to this writing lesson. It covers topics that range from dialogue punctuation to sentence types, and will definitely help improve reading comprehension skills.

Encourage your students to translate their understanding of theme to poetry. In this lesson, students will evaluate the theme of poems by sketching pictures and citing text evidence.

The energizer bunny went to jail. He was charged with battery. Get it? Your students will understand after this lesson! Use this lesson to give your students tools to understand and create Easter puns.

Do your students need guidance in online peer conferences? If you need to teach your students how to collaborate in an online writing conference, then this lesson plan is for you!

Knowing how to write an effective persuasive letter is a powerful tool. Students will learn how to advocate for their ideas by planning and drafting a well-supported persuasive letter on an issue of their choice.

Help your students learn how to move smoothly between ideas and paragraphs using transition words and phrases. Young writers will use real texts as mentors as they study how authors use words to transition between ideas and support their claims. As a result, they will have a word bank to use in their own writing.

Hone your students' close reading skills by using this interesting and fun lesson that teaches your class survival skills in an informational text.

What if Cinderella’s stepsisters weren’t really evil? In this engaging lesson, you will introduce your students to multiple points of view and discuss how these different perspectives can change a reader’s experience.

Using this lesson plan, your students will synthesize literary information by reimagining storyline outcomes. Substituting characters from their favorite texts and reimagining the effects will excite and bring your class new insights!

Use this lesson to help your ELs understand how to cite their answers based on inferences they make about a text. It can be a stand-alone lesson or used as support to the lesson Colorful Coding.

The flying, crowing, strutting figure of Peter Pan is known to kids of all ages, but how much do we really know? In this lesson, your class will use the Peter Pan and Neverland workbook to take a closer look at Peter and his world.

Help your students become shining stars with this lesson about metaphors. Your class will hone art skills and practice comparison using figurative language.

Help your students' favorite characters come to life in new adventures as student writers draft new endings to their favorite stories.

Allow your students to explore how stories may change depending on the perspectives from which they're told. Interesting texts and a creative writing assignment make this quite the engaging lesson.

Similes, metaphors, and idioms are some of the most widely used literary devices in both speaking and writing. Students will review each of these and practice creating some of their own.

Use this lesson to help your ELs identify and discuss the author's point and the information that supports it. It can be a stand-alone lesson or used as support for the What’s the Point? lesson.

Use this lesson to help your ELs understand main idea and supporting details in the context of sentences and paragraphs. It can be a stand-alone lesson or a support lesson to the Power Reading lesson.

Help students learn how to read passages with multiple main ideas and differentiate between main ideas and supporting details by creating a graphic organizer with proof from the text.