Combining art projects with writing projects introduces young students to the fun of writing to communicate in images. Ask students to write their names with letter-pictures. For instance, if a girl named Alice writes her name, she can make each letter into a different animal, character, plant or insect. For example, the letter A could be drawn as a pea plant on a trellis. Sit with your students and draw your name, too, for the children to see that everyone writes and has fun with art and writing.
Make spelling flashcards for students to learn the spellings of small words. Depending on the writing and reading level of your students, start with words they know, such as "cat," "dog," "tree" and "home." On one side of the card spell out the word "cat." On the other side, have a picture of a cat. For one half of the exercise, for very early writers -- such as kindergartners -- show the spelling of the word to students and spell it out with them "C-A-T," accentuating each letter sound. For more mature emergent writers, show the back of the card -- the picture -- to the class. Ask students to write down the word for the object and to spell it out. When you finish showing the set of flashcards, check the students' papers to see which students got all of the spelling correct. Award them with a small prize or just a "great job!"
Give students a long sheet of construction paper, from the large rolls of paper, about 5 feet long and a foot high. Ask the students to write an acrostic poem, where every letter in their first name (or they can choose to do their last name instead) makes up a word that starts with the same letter. Instead of a traditional poem, broken into lines, this acrostic will be written in a long stretch. For example, if a boy named Samuel writes a poem, he can first write a bold and colorful "S." He can then continue the letter by writing "Sincere" "Active" "Magnificent" "Unusually funny" "empathetic" and "laughing." Hang the name "banners" around the room to decorate and show off artistic and linguistic talent.
Write a collaborative group story. This activity is ideal for first and second grade, and above. Divide students into small groups of three or four. One student in each group writes a few simple sentences of a story on a sheet of paper. He then folds over the paper so the next writer cannot see his text. The next student writes another sentence, or set of sentences, and after folding the paper over, passes the paper to the next student. Continue the process until one page, or two pages, are filled with text. Ask all the groups to unfold their collaborative stories and read them as a group. The results may be silly, funny or insightful, but either way, the emerging writers "make up an 'exquisite truth' which could never be arrived at alone," as undergraduate students in Georgetown University's literature department describe it.