As students learn about new types of papers, teachers should provide them with graphic organizers to help focus their thinking and keep their papers on topic. Teachers can create their own graphic organizers for students or find books and online resources with pre-created graphic organizers. "50 Graphic Organizers for Reading, Writing & More," compiled by Linda Irwin-DeVitis and published by Scholastic, is a resource teachers can purchase to use in the classroom. Education Place (eduplace.com), from educational publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, also offers numerous free graphic organizers for teachers.
ReadWriteThink (readwritethink.org), an online writing resources sponsored by the International Reading Association and National Council for Teachers of English, offers numerous student interactives to help with writing. For example, the Bio-Cube interactive helps students identify key facts about a person to aid in writing a biography, and the Essay Map interactive helps students organize their thoughts for an informational descriptive essay. Interactives are also available to help students generate letters, create a plot diagram and organize information with a Venn diagram.
Teachers with an interactive whiteboard in their classroom can scan or type in student work and display it on the whiteboard to help students practice editing. Using a different color of highlighter for each type of error, students can take turns coming up to the board and highlighting errors. Teachers can create their own pieces full of errors to avoid student embarrassment and target errors with which students are having issues. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt also offers Power Proofreading, in which students can choose their grade level and a writing passage, focusing on finding the errors or parts of speech the program designates.
Students in fifth grade need practice using desktop and Internet publishing tools. Several online websites allow students to publish and illustrate their stories and papers for free. ZooBurst (zooburst.com) allows students to create a 3-D digital pop-up book. ArtisanCam (artisancam.org.uk) provides an online picture-book maker. Lightning Bug (lightningbug.com.au) helps students find, develop or finish a story idea.