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"Bloom's and Gardner's Writing Matrix for Years 3/4/5" This writing matrix is directly linked to blooms taxonomy and Gardner's multiple intelligences. It includes a wide range of writing activities

" Regie Routman believes that sustained time for reading and writing meaningful text must be our first priority to turn students into readers, writers, and thinkers. In her latest ASCD book, Read, Write, Lead: Breakthrough Strategies for Schoolwide Literacy Success, Routman shares best practices that can lead to better engagement and achievement in reading and writing for all students, including second-language and struggling learners. One way to engage students in informational, complex text is to demonstrate close reading, also known as analytic reading.  In the following excerpt, Routman shares her thoughts on being a "reading role model" and why close reading is a necessity for students' understanding."

A lot of good ideas for writing.

"From writing advice to reading recommendations, we get up close and personal with some of the finest creators of Young Adult (YA) literature in the country. The Centre for Youth Literature connects Australia's young adults with books, stories and writing. Creatively produced by the Centre for Youth Literature in partnership with the Melbourne Writers Festival. YA Writers: Myke Bartlett, AJ Betts, Isobelle Carmody, Cath Crowley, Ellie Marney, Richard Newsome, Alice Pung, Penny Tangey, Carole Wilkinson, Lili Wilkinson, and Claire Zorn"

A piece that brings together, in an annotated list, a number of useful tools for writing purposes. There are also a number of other mentioned in the comments that follow the post.

The best online based writing company. Helpful in meeting any student's writing needs.

Two of Australia's best-selling children's book authors Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton question the value of the NAPLAN testing. They wonder why attributes such as creativity are not considered. They doubt the NAPLAN testing can offer any offer valuable insights into kids' reading and writing skills. They also make a final statement about the importance and value of teacher librarians.

"This is an editing and grammar checking tool. It checks dozens of areas including:Passive verbs; Overused phrases; Vague phrasing; Cliches; Punctuation; Hyphens. It also checks for plagiarism and is great for teaching students about plagiarism, how to avoid it and how easily it's detected nowadays. In addition to correcting grammatical errors, it also provides tips and explanations for students to improve their writing."

I liked this for the Lego Creation Stationhowever there are more ideas here. "At this station, I have pre packaged 4 different ziplock bags of 100 legos each.  Students will choose the lego bag, and take a planning sheet.  Students are asked to draw and write about what they are planning to create.  (The boys in my class are crazy about lego so I thought this would be a great motivator for them.)  Students then will build their creation using their blueprint.  When they are finished, they will take a picture of their creation, add it to the class book that I have created on the Book Creator App and write a summary of their creation and how it compared to what they had originally planned."

"Write-a-Book-in-a-Day is a literary and fundraising initiative of the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre and Princess Margaret Hospital Foundation."

A compilation of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks - Codex Arundel - was digitized by the British Library and made available to the public. Whilst Leonardo never published his notes, you can look through 570 digitized pages of Codex Arundel here. For hundreds of years, the huge collection of manuscripts remained mostly unseen. After Leonardo's death in France, writes the British Library, his student Francesco Melzi "brought many of his manuscripts and drawings back to Italy. Melzi's heirs, who had no idea of the importance of the manuscripts, gradually disposed of them." Nonetheless, over 5,000 pages of notes "still exist in Leonardo's 'mirror writing', from right to left." These notebooks contain da Vinci's "visions of the aeroplane, the helicopter, the parachute, the submarine and the car. It was more than 300 years before many of his ideas were improved upon."

" DET site page assist learning from home. They will continue to update this page in the coming weeks. On this page: Learning continuity contingency planning: early childhood and Learning continuity contingency planning: schools Online options Offline options Tips for remote curriculum delivery  Learning continuity contingency planning: early childhood When planning for children's learning continuity in the event of closure, early childhood education and care services may consider: identifying ways early childhood teachers and educators can initiate group or individual contact with children to maintain learning opportunities implementing activities with children by using available technologies maintaining contact with families to discuss and track the wellbeing of children and discuss the progress of children's development identifying ways educators can improve the implementation and documentation of the service's program and maintain educator practice. There are resources services can provide to support parents and carers to engage in learning activities with their children at home: Play-based learning for pre-schoolers - provides suggestions for good structured and unstructured play experiences for 3 - 5 year olds How to build literacy skills from birth to year 2 - includes tips on how to help build children's skills in speaking, listening, reading and writing How to build numeracy skills from birth to year 2 - includes tips on how to build children's skills in maths, measurement and patterns Building STEM skills for children - includes ways to engage children with STEM related experiences. Raising Children Network also has a range of learning activities for pre-schoolers. It includes tips and ideas as well as videos of drawing, writing, storytelling, counting and other activities that can be done at home. Services may also want to give parents information about talking to their children about COVID-19. For example: UNICEF's How to talk to

"Your friendly guide to the world of grammar, punctuation, usage, and fun developments in the English language." A good "writing" blog to follow - useful for all sorts of tips on using English.

First up is a tutorial on Jellybean Writer. The video is embedded below. Jellybean Writer is a free tool for creating picture books. Students can import pictures from their computers then write captions for each image. All stories can be saved online or downloaded and printed. If picture books are too simple for your students, they can skip using pictures and select one of the text only templates for the pages in their books. As you will see in the video below, teacher can create and manage student accounts in Jellybean Scoop.

Another interesting way to use the technology with a good explanation about how the author did this.

ReadWriteThink Notetaker. Useful for a wide variety of reading and writing activities, this outlining tool allows students to organize up to five levels of information.

Third grade students created this video, How to Write a Quality Comment, and it highlights the importance of embedding digital citizenship lessons into the youngest classrooms.