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These short, accessible, image-driven prompts invite students to pen short stories, poems, and memoirs; share experiences from their lives; analyze illustrations, graphs, and charts; and tell us their opinions on hot-button issues. This list from The York Times provides all the prompts that were published during the 2021-22 school year.

There are multiple categories of prompts that can be used for students to practice various modes of writing including:

What story does this image inspire for you?

Share experiences from your own life.

What do you think this image, chart or cartoon is saying?

What’s your opinion on this issue?

These prompts are intended to be used as skill practice after students have been taught the structure and mechanics of narrative, explanatory, and argumentation writing. The teacher should preview the prompts to ensure they are appropriate for the intended grade level. 

What do students need to know to succeed in fourth grade (or third or fifth)? What supplies are needed? What rules and steps should be followed? These and many other questions provide the framework for students to write how-to essays for a specific audience—future fourth graders. Although this lesson focuses specifically on the fourth grade, it can be easily adapted for third or fifth graders. Students first learn about the how-to writing genre by reading an assortment of instruction manuals. This also demonstrates how how-to writing relates to their everyday lives. The teacher then models each step of the writing process as the students write about how to be a successful fourth graders. After students publish their writing, the final drafts are saved for the following year's fourth graders to read at the beginning of the next school year.

This video will teach students about simple and compound sentences. Students will learn about dependent and independent clauses and combining prepositional phrases with coordinating conjunctions. 

Students complete a chart describing Duke Ellington’s motivations for playing the piano and describe how these motivations changed his attitude toward playing the piano.

This resource provides students with an opportunity to analyze character motivation. 

After students have studied the basics of fusion and fission as well as the splitting of the atom, groups of three choose a nuclear chemistry topic to research, finding the “what, how, where, and why” of their subject. After conducting their research, students use the free Web 2.0 tool Timetoast to construct an online timeline that features fifteen important facts with images and captions about their topic. Students then use the timelines to present their newly acquired knowledge to the class.

The teacher will present an informational text from the website, ReadWorks. Students will interact with this non-fiction text by annotating the text digitally. This learning activity can introduce students to the concept of physical weathering or serve as reinforcement after students have already learned this concept. This classroom resource can be paired with the classroom resource "Chemical Weathering of Rocks," so students can compare and contrast these two destructive forces.

A terrible dragon has attacked the kingdom of Lingua and only a Nouns Master will be able to save it. Will it be you? Put your knowledge of nouns to the test as you venture through Parts of Speech Quest-Nouns!

Watch out for inappropriate shifts in pronoun number and person! A shift is when there is a disparity between the perspectives, from the first person, second person, and third person. It is important to maintain perspectives when referring to the same people or things. This resource includes a video, background reading, and a practice handout.

Poetry offers many opportunities for word play and learning about language. But because poetry can seem inaccessible, many students approach poetry writing with trepidation. This lesson for third and fourth-grade students is designed to overcome student fears by using a traditional poem to teach students about alliteration. After reading the book A My Name Is... by Alice Lyne, students use a variety of print and online resources to brainstorm their own alliterative word lists. They then create a poetry link that uses the traditional poem they have read together as a framework for their own poems.

The teacher will present an informational text from the website, ReadWorks. The students and teacher can interact with this non-fiction text by annotating the text digitally. The students will answer the questions associated with the article as an assessment. This learning activity can be used to introduce students to the phases of matter, serve as reinforcement after students have already learned this concept, or be used as an assessment at the conclusion of a lesson. This learning activity will provide important background information before students create their own investigations. 

Sir Readalot is an interactive game that helps students with context clues. Other skills that kids can work on in this classroom resource include drawing conclusions, facts and opinions, and syllables. This classroom resource also includes a quiz, worksheet, and teaching video to help with understanding.

A clause is a group of words that acts as a subject and a group of words that acts as a verb. A clause consists of a subject and a predicate, where the predicate is typically a verb phrase. This resource provides instruction and practice in identifying the function of phrases and clauses.

Diversity is celebrated in this lesson in which students embark on a cultural research project by first reading a variety of alphabet books about world cultures, including D is for Doufu: An Alphabet Book of Chinese Culture by Maywan Shen Krach. They then select a culture to study and work in groups to conduct research into the history and symbols of their selected culture. The unit includes tools for conducting primary interviews and other research techniques. The project culminates with each group writing and illustrating a cultural alphabet book based on their research. Groups share their work with the class and invited guests during a Diversity Celebration.

The teacher will present an informational text from the website, ReadWorks. The students and teacher can interact with this non-fiction text by annotating the text digitally. The students will answer the questions associated with the article as an assessment. This learning activity can be used to provide information regarding geologic events that happen over a short period of time, serve as reinforcement after students have already learned this concept, or be used as an assessment at the conclusion of a lesson. This learning activity includes a StepRead: StepReads are less complex versions of the original article. StepRead1 (SR1) is less complex than the original article, and StepRead2 (SR2) is less complex than SR1. This will allow the teacher to use this learning activity with students of varying ability levels. 

Compound words are longer words made by joining two shorter words, which need to be understood to grow your vocabulary in leaps and bounds. This interactive lesson is a superb tool to understand the concept using numerous examples. How to form, recognize and use compound words and their different types, closed-form, hyphenated form, and open form, concepts will be conquered very easily. This resource offers videos, games, and worksheets to help further understand the concept.

Learn how Shakespeare invented the structure and character types we have come to love in modern romantic comedies in this video from Shakespeare Uncovered. In the play Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick banter back and forth as sparring partners who seem to hate each other, but underneath it, all, are actually in love. Helen Hunt reveals how the play inspired countless romantic comedies in Hollywood and gave voice to a new kind of heroine, full of wit and the power of words.

Be sure to use the Discussion Questions under the Support Materials to help meet the standards.

Using a story which has been written collaboratively, students engage in a whole-group revising process by having each student add a sentence at a time (see the ReadWriteThink lesson Collaborative Stories 1: Prewriting and Drafting). The teacher leads this shared-revising activity to help students consider story content. Students begin by reading their collaborative story and then discuss ways of making changes. Then, after revisions have been made, they reread the story as a group. Finally, students come to a consensus on a title for their story.

Students will analyze four different cigarette ads to understand the meaning of critical viewing and active viewing. They have an opportunity to study the elements— in this case, an advertisement for tobacco, and consider a series of questions, each designed to elicit important clues and information. This interactive learning activity can be used during a lesson on how social media influences health behaviors or when studying author's purpose.

The apostrophe has two important jobs: it shows possession or ownership, and it stands in for letters that have been removed from words when a contraction is made. It's important to know how to use the apostrophe correctly. People make mistakes all the time! This classroom resource will teach students when to use an apostrophe. This resource offers informational material, quizzes, videos, and games about the use of apostrophes.

A relative adverb is a word that talks about a place, time, or reason for something. Remember the three "w's": where, when, and why.

This resource allows students to practice identifying relative adverbs.

A picture book, The Coal Thief by Alane Adams, is read aloud by Christian Slater on The SAG-AFTRA Foundation's Daytime Emmy-nominated and award-winning children's literacy website, Storyline Online. This video provides an opportunity for students to establish a purpose before reading a literary text to enhance comprehension.  The teacher may instruct students to be listening for a central problem and solution, place and time period (setting), character development, or other literary elements in the text as they listen to the read-aloud.

After exploring a variety of circle plot storybooks, students identify, explore, and apply the elements of circle plot structures to their own stories. "Reading like writers," students will explore the ways that stories are structured; then, "writing like writers," students explore organizational structures in their own writing. Students first examine the attributes of circular shapes and brainstorm things with a circular pattern, such as seasons. After exploring how Cynthia Rylant's Long Night Moon might be a circular story, students listen to a circle story read aloud. Students discuss why the story is called a circular story and make connections to Rylant's book. They then read several more examples and, using circle plot diagrams as their tools, students write their own circular plot stories. Finally, students share their work with peers, revise their work using a checklist for self-evaluation, and compare their self-evaluation to teacher assessment.