Leanne Barto

Looking for a different kind of book report and one that is easy assign remotely? Kids love this project!! The Pizza Box book report combines reading, research, and creativity into a book report that goes way beyond writing a summary for each chapter. Students will read for comprehension, skim for for specific details, and analyze the book as a whole to gain the big picture as to why the person or event is important to us today. This packet includes a teacher instruction page; student instru

Easy to use rubric to help students write an alternate ending to a literature book they've just finished. Encourages students to narrow their focus and maintain clear direction in their writing. Perfect for an end of unit activity and practice with narrative writing. Rubric follows my simplified ERB/WrAP rubric but with specific guidelines for an alternate ending.

A post-writing exercise to help students recognize errors in the overuse of words that begin a sentence as well as identify tense shifts in their writing. Students quickly identify over-used words and shifts in tense as they study their text and complete the chart. This activity is also perfect for a revision strategy, prior to writing the final draft. Sentence Analysis Workshop by Leanne Barto is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licens

The Story Landscape book report is an artistic way to plot the effects of a storyline on a book’s main character. Analysis of each main event gives students practice in determining not only if the event was positive or negative, but by what degree it impacted positively or negatively. Artistic skill is not a prerequisite as the grade is determined by effort, creativity, detail, and neatness. To help prevent students from merely copy/pasting a summary found online, I encourage students to take no

Congratulations! You survived the last few months of last school year and a new school year is almost upon us. Now what? Most of us will be returning to the classroom in a few weeks but with several noticeable changes. Many will be teaching to students in person while streaming to an audience at home. This hybrid learning experience will be challenging to many, myself included, but here are a few tips to get your new Google Classrooms ready for whatever comes our way. This sheet includes easy t

A simplified yet detailed writing rubric for those looking to teach writing using the 6-Trait writing method or those preparing their students for the WrAP writing exam (also known as the ERB writing exam). Includes all the concepts necessary for successful writing but presented in a way that is less daunting and easier for students to understand.