Adding Variety through Short Writing Assignments
from: Reading and Writing across the High School Science and Math Curriculum
Brief Description
Short, frequent writing assignments designed to add variety to classwork, and to encourage
students to think with inventiveness.
Objective
To give students experience in expanding ideas, synthesizing information, and using their
imaginations.
Procedure
1. Extinct No More
Tap your students' knowledge of issues concerning endangered species by having them write a brief account of the rediscovery of an animal once considered extinct. Or, you can have your students write an obituary of an endangered species.
2. Blast Off!
Encourage your students to weigh the risks and rewards of space flight by having them explain in writing why they would or would not like to be a passenger on the Space Shuttle. Or, have them describe an experiment to be conducted on board the Shuttle.
3. For Sale
Inform your students that a tract of land is being sold in your community. Fictitious bidders include the National Park Service, a children's hospital, a shopping-mall developer, an oil drilling company, and the U.S. Armed Forces. Have each student become a lobbyist for one of these, and have them write arguments on behalf of their interests.
4. How Do you Use It?
Assist your students in learning how to use laboratory equipment by having them choose a scientific instrument form your lab, and write directions on how to use it.
5. What's New?
You and your students can write about your experiences on a recent field trip. Send the account to your local newspaper.
6. Little-known Edisons
Your students can learn about the history of inventions by writing about the origin of everyday objects, such as roller skates, safety pins, or ice-cream cones.
7. Exploration Stories
Form "exploration groups" of about five students. Starting with an opening line for a story, pass the story around the group, each student adding a sentence or two to the story.
8. Questions Up Front
You and your students write down as many questions about a new unit of instruction as you can BEFORE the unit begins.
9. What Do You Do?
Have your students write about a science-related profession, explaining why they are interested in it. As a class, choose a few scientific career options of interest, and invite a member of that profession to speak to the class.
10. Choose!
Have your students choose some thing that they could imagine being (an asteroid, a cactus, a volcano), and describe why they would choose to be that thing.
11. Free Association
Write a scientific term on the board. Have your students make a list of words that they associate with that term. Compare the lists to demonstrate to students that they do not all have the same mental picture of the concept. Next, engage in another round of free association, and see what new metaphors, analogies, and images crop up to describe the term on the board.
12. Identification
Have your students picture themselves as part of a scientific phenomenon, and write about the experience. Phenomena include respiration, blood flow, transmission of nerve signals, chemical reactions, heat transfer, lightning, combustion, and propagation of radio waves.
13. Filling in the Gaps
Have your students describe museum exhibits that might have been, but were not, present at a museum that they visited.
14. New Space in Outer Space
Have your students make up a new planet. Have them describe the important features of the landscape, what the climate is like, and what lives there. They might write from the viewpoint of the first visitor to this planet.
15. Design a T-Shirt
Try this during a unit on environmental science or wildlife preservation. Take the design to a local mall where they tailor T-shirts and have the "creations" produced.
16. What Should It Look Like?
Gather illustrations of plants with unusual names. Give students one name, and ask them to describe what it might look like. Give the same name to more than one student so that they can compare their descriptions. Show them the illustration of the plant after they have completed their descriptions.
17. The Practical Environment
Have the students gather maxims on how to conserve natural resources. Have them think up new ways of conservation, recycling, and efficient use of natural resources.
18. Oh, No!
Your students can grapple with issues concerning form and function by writing about how the world would be different if cockroaches were the size of poodles (or other such distortions of scale and size).
19. What a Pen Pal?
Have your students write a letter to an inhabitant of another planet explaining basic things on Planet Earth, such as what air, water, earth, and fire are.
20. On the Air
Have your students imagine that they are talk-show hosts getting ready to interview a famous scientist. Have them write down some questions that will elicit useful, interesting information from the scientist.
21. You Should Join!
Encourage your students to design a flyer to encourage other students to join the science club.
22. Turning the Tables
Have your students rewrite a section of their science text so that a third-grader could understand it.
23. What's on the Test?
Have your students write easy, average, and hard questions that might appear on their next unit exam. (And warm them: These questions just might appear on the exam.)
24. It's Their Turn
Have the students themselves come up with a writing activity for their class.
Results
Students get a chance to use their imaginations; they sharpen their language skills in a science
class.
Source
Lehman, Jeffrey and Jane Harper Yarbrough. "Twenty-five (Scientific) Writing Activities,"
Science Teacher v50 n2 Feb 1983: pp. 27-29.
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