Ten best templates for science, social studies, and language arts activities

ReadWriteThink offers a good interactive guide that can help students create a well-motivated essay. Motivation Map asks students to start with a thesis statement before they walk through developing support for that thesis. Students can print their persuasion maps or email you. RWT offers several lesson plans that include inspiration maps. You can find those lessons at the bottom of this page.

Essay Maps provides students with step-by-step instructions for creating an informative essay. Some of my students seem to struggle the most to create an introduction and conclusion to their essays. Essay maps to help students visualize the steps needed to build a particularly good introduction and conclusion paragraph. After students have completed all the steps of their essay map they can print the outline of their essay.

Read Right Thinks Crossword Puzzle Generator makes it easy to create your own crossword puzzle. To create your puzzle just write a list of words, a hint for your word and then let the generator create a puzzle for you. You can test the puzzle before printing. You can print blank puzzles and answer sheets from the puzzle generator.

Alphabet Organizer is a small tool of Read Write Think that students can use to create alphabet charts and books. The idea behind Alphabet Organizer is to help students make a visual connection between the letters of the alphabet and the first letter of a common word. Here’s my demo of how it works.

The RWT timeline provides a great way for elementary school students to create timelines that include pictures and text. It doesn’t offer nearly as many options as other timeline creation tools, but it’s easy to use and enough for elementary school settings.

RWT’s Animal Search Guide is a perfect fit for elementary school science lessons. Animal Search provides students with four templates; Animal information, animal cubs, animal interactions and animal habitat. Each template is an interactive template where students respond to three prompts to help them create a brief report about the animals they are studying. Read-write suggests using questions from animal search templates as a prompt for thought research. The questions in the template can also be good for helping students to research additional questions for intelligence.

RWT’s theme Poems Interactive provides 32 images for students to use as a basis for writing short poems. Students turn to interactive to write a poem then choose a theme. In each of the five themes students will find related images. Once they have chosen a picture, students are asked to write down the words that come to mind as they look at the picture. Students then create poems from those words. The finished product can be saved as a PDF or emailed to a teacher from the RWT site.

Trading Card Generator is one of my all time favorite templates from RWT. With the help of this template students can create trading cards about people (real and imaginary), places and things. Here is the video I made about Trading Card Generator earlier this year.

The RWT flip book template allows students to create books by typing or drawing on their book pages. There are various page templates that students can choose to use in their books. Some templates are for text only, some for drawing only, and some are a mixture of drawing and text templates. To use RWT flip books students simply open the template, enter their first name, then start creating their first page.

Read Write Think’s Word Mover helps students develop poems and short stories. When students open the Word Mover app they are shown a selection that they can drag on a canvas to create a poem or story. Word Mover provides students with a variety of background colors and patterns on which they can create their poems. If the word bank provided by Word Mover does not offer enough words, they can add their own words to the word bank.