Invite each student to identify her favorite thing to eat and write the name of it or draw a picture at the top of the page. Underneath, have her write a sentence each to identify characteristics of the food's appearance, texture, sound when it's cooking or when it's eaten, smell and taste. Have older students connect the sentences into a paragraph or two, and perhaps give extra credit for additional details.
Depending on the skills of the students and the foods they have identified, ask them to write recipes for making their favorite foods or any foods they choose. Provide some simple recipe cards for them to use as models, perhaps for sandwiches or simple assembly of something such as whoopie pies. Emphasize to students how to separate the ingredients list from instructions, itemize the steps of the instructions, and arrange the ingredients in the same order. For more complex dishes, this exercise may require assignment over a weekend and requests that parents arrange serve the dish.
Carry on the food theme by asking students to tell stories about making or enjoying the foods they've described. Alternatively, they might describe a holiday meal or a family reunion, or create a completely fictional or fantastic situation. Discuss character and setting, and invite students to share story elements from books they've read.
Take the same story, even if it was fictional, and turn it into a journalistic treatment using the classic who, what, when, where and why and the inverse-pyramid structure. Discuss why newspapers use this structure. As a parallel or alternate exercise, have students write biographies of the characters from the stories. Younger writers may be helped by breaking biographical information into six categories --- identification of the subject, with time and place, something about the subject's background, character traits, what makes the person important, problems the person overcame and something memorable he said.
Have students observe plants, animals or insects, or perhaps the effect of leavening in a favorite cake, and write up their observations as lab reports. Have students trade reports and replicate each other's studies. Discuss how science works by reading other scientists' observations and adjusting them to match additional observations.