Creative Writing Sites

BBC Skillswise: Words
http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/words/grammar/
Great Britain has created a great site featuring a series of colorful, targeted language arts lessons in areas such as using apostrophes, avoiding double negatives, joining sentences, etc. There are occasional "Britishisms" but the site is still excellent.

Biography Maker
http://www.bham.wednet.edu/bio/biomaker.htm
The Biography Maker is designed to help you write a fascinating and effective biography. It is meant to inspire lively story telling and vivid writing, which will make your readers want to know more about your subject. To create an exciting biography you will follow four steps (Questioning, Learning, Synthesis, and Story-Telling) that will guide you through the writing process. As the final stage, you will have an opportunity to review your biography by considering the Six Traits of Effective Writing.

BusinessLetterPunch.com
http://www.businessletterpunch.com/
Businessletterpunch.com helps students write business letters through the use of an interactive online interface. The site provides an authentic business letter writing topic that changes periodically; students then use this topic to move through a series of steps beginning with pre-writing and finishing with a publishing step. Useful tips and prompts are associated with the tool to guide students through creating their business letter.

Can I Have a Word
http://www.barbican.org.uk/canihaveaword/
The Barbican fine arts center presents this award winning site presenting four lessons to inspire creative writing. "Changing Voices" focuses on life in South Africa, "The Elements" examines earth, wind, fire and water in the arts, "The Human Body" uses the body to inspire poetry, and "The Odyssey" traces the story of Odysseus as a means for teaching students to develop characters. Eight poets from a variety of cultures discuss poetry and read from their own works.

DigiTales
http://www.digitales.us/index.php
"DigiTales' Website provides ideas, resources and inspiration for families, individuals, schools, organizations, corporations, churches and everyone else ready to discover the power and magic of merging the art of storytelling with the enchantment of using digital tools." Learn the seven story making steps, gather ideas by exploring the many DigiTales stories, and then learn how to create your own.

Elements of Language Model Bank
http://go.hrw.com/eolang/modbank/
This site could be a Language Arts teacher's best pal. Holt, Rinehart and Winston's Elements of Language presents a collection of writing models designed to help students learn to write a wide variety of essay types common to both middle school and high school writing. It covers just about every type of writing exercise.

English Teacher
http://teacher2b.com/creative/createwr.htm
This web site contains units for teaching facets of creative writing and the complete lesson plans for a creative writing course. Further units will be added. All of these units have been used in the classroom. They have been used with students ranging from 9th grade to college. Teachers should choose the units which they feel are most suitable for the classes they are teaching.

Essay Info: Essay Writing Center
http://essayinfo.com/
Writing Basics, Tips, Types, citations styles, even resume writing, all are available as a presentation of the writing process in a simple and understandable way. Both business and academic needs are addressed with samples provided of the different forms of writing. Very useful is the citations section, allowing the choice from among MLS, APA, Turabian and Chicago citation style sheets. Examples on how to cite a variety of written and media forms are modeled with brief but useful tips.

Essay Punch
http://www.essaypunch.com/
Essay Punch provides an interface for students to develop an essay online. The site provides a guided approach to writing an essay that includes help with an introduction, 2-3 paragraph body, and conclusion. Writers are guided through the process with help questions that target all steps (pre-writing, writing, organizing, editing, rewriting, and publishing) in the writing process. Tips along the way stimulate student thinking. Although this site also sells writing software, the Essay Punch interface provides an interesting and useful writing environment and experience for students at no cost. Teachers can use this site to provide additional enrichment writing opportunities for their students.

Everyday Spelling
http://www.everydayspelling.com/welcome.html
This is a great resource for students in grades k-8. There are dozens of activities categorized by grade level to help students learn to spell. Visit the Workout Room for Puzzles, Words in the News, Writing Prompts, and Language Facts. The Reference Room has 25 Frequently Misspelled Words for each grade as well as Links to language tools and Spelling Strategies.

Fairy Tale Autobiographies (an example lesson from Read-Write-Think)
http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=1
Studying Fairy Tales for the elements they share is of interest to middle school learners. This lesson requires students to work together in small groups to read, discuss, and analyze fairy tales for characters, setting, conflict and theme. It also requires them to work together to decide what kind of experience they will write about, to edit and illustrate their stories, and finally to choose how to bind their group books.

Get It Write: Writing Tips: Tip Archive
http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/tips.htm
This list of over 60 brief writing tips covers everything from the confusion between "lie" and "lay," to how to insert special characters into a word-processed document. The topics cover most common grammar and usage problems, but the detailed explanations demand a decent reading level and the ability to follow written arguments.

Get Writing
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/getwriting/quizindex
This is a comprehensive site devoted to the art and craft of writing. Get Writing offers quizzes, mini-courses, idea tools and more. Users will notice minor differences between British English and American English, but the lessons apply on either side of the Atlantic.

Grammar Bytes
http://www.chompchomp.com/menu.htm
This is a great site to learn grammar rules in a fun way. Look up Terms for great explanations, complete interactive Exercises, use Handouts to keep track of your answers, and read Tips & Rules for everyday grammar.

Guide to Grammar and Writing
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/
A treasure of grammar and writing information, but one requiring good reading ability. At this very content-rich site the main page's links break further down to sentence level, paragraph level, and essay level. The site also contains Adobe Acrobat samples of business writing and research papers, PowerPoint presentations, interactive quizzes, Q&A service, book resource list, on-line resource list, quotes from famous people on writing, and "grammar goofs" gleaned from college and high school writing.

High School Journalism
http://www.highschooljournalism.org/  
Sponsored by The American Society of Newspaper Editors and The Radio and Television News Directors Foundation, to help scholastic journalism grow where it does not exist and flourish where it does. This site is geared toward teen journalists, their teachers and guidance counselors. Content includes skills-building exercises, sample lesson plans, a spotlight on high school newspapers across the country, interaction with professional journalists, updates on scholastic press freedom issues, a database of journalism scholarships and links to university journalism programs.

Kids on the Net
http://www.kidsonthenet.org.uk/
This site contains poems and stories by children all over the world. Categories include Writing with a Difference, Authors and Reading, All About Me, and Creative Writing.

Literacy Rules
http://www.literacyrules.com 
Provides links to a visual thesaurus, rhyming dictionary, webquests, poetry and author profiles.

Longman Vocabulary Website
http://wps.ablongman.com/long_licklider_vocabulary_2/0,6658,282760-,00.html
Topics such as "Synonyms," "Antonyms," "Homonyms," "Easily Confused Words," and "Using Context Clues" allow users to practice vocabulary development with interactive quizzes. Select an appropriate range of difficulty, from beginner to advanced, and find between 8 to 10 quizzes at that level for each topic. As a bonus, click on the link to "100 Words That All High School Graduates Should Know" and see how many you've mastered.

MakeBeliefsComix
http://www.makebeliefscomix.com/
A rich, interactive site where learners can create their own comic strips by selecting characters with different moods and making them talk and think. Includes story ideas and prompts to help jump-start ideas. An excellent device for teaching language, reading, writing, story-telling, and creative self-expression skills. An excellent activity, also, for applying what you know about sequencing events, writing dialogue, and predicting what comes next.

Making Sentences
http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/words/grammar/sentencebasics/whatisasentence/index.shtml
Discover how to make sentences through this resource. In addition to a factsheet and worksheets, this site provides three games and three quizzes to test your skills. When you finish with this site, you can easily move on to other writing skill pages.

Nellie's English Projects
http://www.nelliemuller.com/Nellies_English_Projects.htm
An ESL teacher developed this site to provide a wide range of resources for both ESL and mainstream students. The site map includes extensive links under the topics with the most useful ones under Students and Tasks, while the Process category focuses on skills (primarily writing). Under Students one has a range of ESL activities available to improve English skills, including games and quiz links. For projects, long and short range, the Tasks category offers links to various web quests with tips on ESL integration.

Online Journalism Review
http://www.ojr.org/

Paragraph a Week: A Yearly Writing Program
http://www.teachersdesk.org/topics/par_week_program.html
Outstanding website with more than 80 paragraph topics. The topics correspond seasonally and they slowly develop all of the skills necessary to write effective paragraphs. While it is designed for a fifth or sixth grade class, most of the assignments could be used at many other grade levels. A parent letter and writing evaluation form are also included.

Punctuation Made Simple
http://lilt.ilstu.edu/golson/punctuation/
At Punctuation Made Simple you can learn the correct way to use a colon, semicolon, comma, dash, and an apostrophe. The site is broken down into a section for each one of these punctuators. Not only do they explain why they are used in the correct fashion, but they give you multiple excellent examples of how they are used correctly in a sentence.

Read-Write-Think
http://www.readwritethink.org/
ReadWriteThink.org is the newest MarcoPolo partner, launched in October 2002. The site aims to provide high-quality English and language arts content for the K-8 classroom teacher. Peer-reviewed lesson plans are standards-based, with new content being added weekly. All lessons have some technology component to them, whether the teacher has to download a handout or guide students through a WebQuest, or work with students on an interactive game.

Scramble Word Magnets
http://www.worldvillage.com/kidz/puzzles/scramble.htm
This is a magnetic word board that students can use to create sentences or poetry. They could also do other activities such as grouping the words together into categories - verbs, adjectives, nouns, etc. To move the words around, click on a word and drag it to its new location.

StoneSoup.com
http://www.stonesoup.com/
Read an online sample of the Stone Soup magazine and highlights from past years. Then click on Writing and Art to view children's work from around the world.

Story Plant
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/starship/english/games/story_plant/big_sound/full.shtml
Students follow directions to create the beginning of a story. They can choose various parts for their story which will make the outcome different. When they finish, they can print out their story and complete it on their own.

Switcheroo Zoo
http://www.switcheroozoo.com/default.htm
Create new and exciting animals using Flash technology and your browser. Learn some basic animal facts then let the fur fly. Students can morph new pets, or use the legs, tail and head of animals to generate discussions of genetic engineering. Lesson plans are available for language arts and science.

Tongue United: A Guide to Grammar, Punctuation, and Style
http://grammar.uoregon.edu/toc.html
Possibly the most comprehensive, thorough, and well-planned tutorial on traditional grammar, this site should be bookmarked by every teacher of English/Language Arts, as well as by anyone who loves language. Educators will want to (1) assign selected parts to pupils, (2) use its detailed explanations to design lessons, and (3) take off the rust that over the years may have gathered on some grammatical knowledge. The site offers excellent interactive practice exercises as well as tests. It is certainly a far cry from those musty old 400-page leaden grammar textbooks.

Values to Pass On
http://www.forbetterlife.org/be_inspired/values.asp
Dedicated to the premise "The values we live by are worth more when we pass them on," the Foundation for a Better Life has created an interactive site for stories based on an alphabetical list of 50+ values, ranging from Ambition to Vision. Each label leads to a page where users may post audio, written, and video stories related to that particular value. This is an excellent site for class discussions, essay-writing, narrative writing, etc.

Vocabulary
http://syndicate.com/
Teachers looking for engrossing methods to teach vocabulary and reading skills will find lots of quizzes and word activities here. The authors of this website have a mission to "make words come alive." This site includes many different types of vocabulary puzzles using "roots," interactive thematic word exercises, and even a comic strip that promotes learning.

Wacky Web Tales
http://www.eduplace.com/tales/
At this site, students select nouns, verbs, adjectives and other types of words to fill in the blanks to create funny stories. There are over 150 stories to try.

Word of the Day
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/wordofday/index.html
Part of the excellent New York Times Learning Network site, this page is a good place for high school students to work on their vocabulary skills, especially if they plan to take the SAT or ACT. Each day the page offers its Word of the Day followed by a Merriam-Webster definition plus an example of the word as used in a recent NY Times article. To the right, courtesy of the Kaplan test-preparation organization, is a question, in SAT/ACT format, that makes use of the word.

Word Wizard
http://readwritethink.org/materials/wordwizard/
Students choose a book to do interactive spelling and thinking activities.

WritingFix
http://writingfix.com/
Have you ever needed someone to help you out with your writing? This site offers help to students and teachers. The lessons and resources are organized based on the 6 Writing Traits model. An especially interesting feature of the site is the "Interactive Instant Plot Creator" which allows users to cycle through a series of characters, settings and conflicts until they find a combination that sparks their imaginations and inspires the creation of a story. There are plenty of clearly categorized writing prompts, lesson instructions and printable handouts that should help teachers of all grade levels find successful ways to guide students to improved writing.