Tanya Need to teach story elements and creative writing during Christmas? The holiday season can bring a whole new excitement to writing. Keep teaching the writing process and new holiday vocabulary through Christmas guided writing templates and graphic organizers. Motivate your students with inspirational prompts & ideas for the brainstorming process, help them organize their ideas and write a story with all of the story elements all in one go! If you are looking for a guided Christmas writing template with prompts differentiated for grade 1-5, you can get one here.
This type of activity aims to reach struggling writers in a class setting. While providing students with vocabulary words, ideas and a template, I feel like my students are set up for a successful writing experience. As a resource teacher, I suggest these types of guided and differentiated activities to the homerooms teachers.
Brainstorm
Every story should have a solid character list, setting and problem. Help students generate interesting Christmas themed story ideas through prompts. Pair these ready-made prompts with a graphic organizer and your students could have an interesting and fun story in the works. These written prompts are also great for ESL learners and weaker writers in your class that need a little bit of extra guidance.
Draft
Once the story plans are made and the student has a clear idea of where their stories are going, it is time to write a draft Christmas story. Available in this guided writing kit is primary lined paper and regular lined paper for the younger and older grades. I like to put calming music on and have them write. They also have access to the themed vocabulary included in this packet.
Revise and Edit and Publish
Next, it is time to revise, edit and publish. There are many ways to revise and edit student work – use what is best for your class. When I co-teach in the classroom, I ask the students to use their spelling dictionaries to correct their spelling. I also ask them to switch paper with a friend to get feedback. Lastly, the student reads their draft to me and i help them make corrections. Side note- I always grade their rough draft and post or showcase their good copy.
Using the good copy Christmas writing template, they then recopy their edited version. This makes for a lovely bulletin board display during the holidays.
If you would like to try a guided Christmas writing, you can get mine in my TPT store, along with other themed guided-writing templates.
For more ideas of the writing process check out my blog post on teaching creative writing.
