Fall Writing Made Simple: Ideas for the Classroom

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Fall + Writing = A Perfect Combination

I may or may not have mentioned somewhere along the way that fall is my favorite season. I think I’ve also mentioned once or twice that I love teaching writing. Put those two favorites together, and I had the perfect recipe for bringing some pretty fun fall writing activities into our classroom and our writing program.

At the beginning of the year, we spend a lot of time learning about sentences, and one activity we do is make sentence books. These are a super simple way to practice writing good sentences with a capital letter, ending punctuation, spaces between words, and simply doing our best work.

This isn’t so much a teaching activity as it is a quick, informal way for me to see how my students are doing with sentence writing each week. I collect the finished pages and turn them into a class book, which lives in our classroom library. I also save some to share with parents at Back-to-School Night so they can see their child’s progress.

As you can see in the examples, the topic for the sentence is written in the upper-left corner. Students write their sentence on the lines and add an illustration. Then they meet with me, and we talk about the four stars.

As we discuss each star, students color in one of the stars on the right side of the page. If a star doesn’t get colored, we work together right then to “fix” the sentence so it can earn that star.

These little moments with students are priceless. We can address any confusion immediately, make the necessary changes together, and their “reward” is earning that star right away. It’s such a simple bit of positive reinforcement, but it works!

💚 Grab Four Star Sentences from TPT.

Opinion Writing with Pumpkins

This activity actually grew out of a discussion we were having about apples. We were talking about our favorite ways to eat apples [insert apple link here], and I thought, why not do the same thing with pumpkins?

But instead of limiting the discussion to our favorite ways to eat pumpkin, I broadened the question to our favorite ways to use a pumpkin. That opened up so many more possibilities—and, of course, naturally brought in a Halloween favorite: carving pumpkins!

As a group, we brainstormed all the different things we could do with pumpkins. We came up with ideas like making pumpkin pie, roasting the seeds, adding pumpkin to a hot drink, using pumpkins for decorations, and, of course, carving them!

Once we had a good list of ideas, students chose their favorite way to use a pumpkin and wrote about their choice on pumpkin-themed writing paper.

All of these opinions naturally led to a graphing activity. We created a class graph using all of our ideas, then used the students’ writing choices to fill it in. Once our graph was complete, we could see which way to use a pumpkin was the most popular, which was the least popular, and where all the other choices fell in between.

💚 Our Favorite Ways to Use a Pumpkin Activities from TPT

Mixed-Up Fall Writing

Have you read Fall Mixed Up by Robert Raczka? It is hilarious and the perfect fall book to inspire—well, writing!

In the story, everything about fall gets confused. Leaves float up, and pumpkins turn red! The mixed-up combinations get students laughing and thinking: How could we mix up fall ourselves?

And so, yet another writing activity was born!

After reading the book, we brainstormed a whole bunch of fall items and activities and talked about what normally happens to them in the fall. Then came the fun part—we mixed them all up!

Some of our mixed-up fall ideas included:

In the fall, we use the leaves from the yard to make pie.

We play football with the scarecrow in the pumpkin patch.

As you can imagine, the students came up with some pretty funny ideas. After they put their ideas into writing, we created a Fall Mixed Up Class Book and added it to our classroom library.

💚 Grab Fall Mixed Up Activities from TPT

Reflective Writing with Scarecrows

I love scarecrows! I have a growing collection of scarecrow books as well as a whole host of scarecrow activities. Every fall, I dedicate a week to reading as many scarecrow books as I can with the group and doing all sorts of related activities.

One of my favorite—and easiest—scarecrow activities is a reflective writing piece inspired by an idea in the book Making Thinking Visible, which I adapted to work with our scarecrow theme.

We begin by making a scarecrow. There are many ways to do this, from a simple drawing to a construction paper creation. For this activity, I found this scarecrow craft and had my students color and cut out their scarecrows, then use watercolors to create a background for their pictures.

After reading so many scarecrow stories, the group is pretty knowledgeable about scarecrows—where they live, what they do, how they are made, and more. Students use all of that knowledge to complete four prompts on prepared speech bubbles:

Students cut out their completed speech bubbles and add them to their scarecrow drawings. They make a great fall bulletin board, but more importantly, the prompts give students a chance to think beyond simply recalling facts about scarecrows and reflect on what a scarecrow might know, hope, see, and hear.

💚 Grab Scarecrow Reflective Writing and Craft from TPT

Building Stronger Sentences with Fall Topics

Fall also works well for practicing sentence-level writing skills. Familiar topics like pumpkins, leaves, apples, and other signs of fall give students plenty to write about while they practice building stronger sentences.

I use fall and pumpkin themes to practice skills like expanding sentences, asking questions, using conjunctions, and writing different types of sentences.

Fall Sentence-Level Writing

Use familiar fall topics to practice sentence-level skills including sentence types, expanding sentences, asking questions, and using because, but, and so.

💚 Grab Fall Sentence-Level Writing Skills Practice from TpT.

Pumpkin Sentence-Level Writing

Bring pumpkins into sentence practice with activities that help students build, expand, and strengthen their sentences while working with a familiar fall topic.

💚 Grab Pumpkins Sentence-Level Writing Skills Practice from TpT.

FREE Fall Writing Pages

Ready for some fall writing? Use these simple fall-themed pages with any of your favorite fall writing activities, or add them to writing centers or independent writing.

💚 Grab the FREE Leaf & Pumpkin Writing Pages

Bringing Fall into Writing

There are so many things I love about fall, and bringing some of those familiar fall themes into our writing gives us even more ways to practice the skills we’re already working on. Whether we’re writing about pumpkins, mixing up fall, or thinking like a scarecrow, a little bit of fall makes writing just that much more fun!