10 Secondary Informative Writing Ideas

ELA Strategies, Middle School

I’m participating in a blog hop with Mrs. McClain over at Buzzing with Mrs. McClain to share what you oughta know about informative writing. In my experience, my students L-O-V-E creative writing assignments. They also get excited about argumentative writing. The latter is likely connected to adolescence and the need to argue (ha!), but its true. Investing my students in informative writing has been a challenge, so I am sharing a couple of best practices.

1) Interviews – Students think of a topic they are interested in, write questions they have, and then answer their questions as experts. Teachers could even assign students a topic and have them interview each other about the topic as if they are “experts.” The only caution here is reminding students that their responses have to grounded in their research.

2) Write Magazine Articles – Allow students to write a magazine article about a topic. If you have access to computers, students can type into the template below, and add pictures. I allow students to name their magazine, and think of ways to hook readers in with their article title.

3) Yearbook Pages – Teachers can assign students an event, person, or place, and allow them to design a yearbook page that captures important information and is appropriate for the topic.

4) Biography – Teachers can add a spin on this by thinking through the format. This could be completed as an interview, an article, or a yearbook page from this a time in the person’s life. Students can then add a written component to narrate the person’s life.

5) The Social Media Frenzy – Many secondary students have at least one social media account. Students can write a compare and contrast paper about two different social media services, or compare and contrast features within one type of social media. For example, students could compare and contrast the effectiveness of hashtags versus using 140 characters to spread an idea.

6) Watch and Describe – This activity is helpful for students who struggle with writing objective summaries. Teachers can use clips from the history channel, or another content aligned resource to have students summarize or write about what they watched. One approach could be to pose a question to students such as, “Can sun and wind make salt water more drinkable?” After watching students can write their response and then discuss, or use the information to conduct additional research, and write a paper.

7) Favorites – Students write about their favorite class, pet, sport, game, team, or book. With this type of writing, focus on how students organize their information into categories, and how they develop their topic.

8) Respond to Literature – Teachers can use the class text to have students respond a question about the text, or write a literary review of the text.

9) Resume – This can be also aid with biography writing with students using a resume format to write about the life of someone. Students could even write their resumes.

10) The Power of Questioning – This is one of my favorites. Students respond to an engaging question that requires research..

I hope something resonated and can be implemented in your classroom. Sample resources from this post can be found {here} and {here}.Teaching students to become better writers is something I enjoy because I’m working on becoming a better writer too. When they write, I write. As we say in my class, “Great writers, write, a lot!” Enjoy!

Click {here} to view more of my writing resources.

This has been another blog post in collaboration with the fabulous Jasmine McClain.

Don’t forget to hop around to the other bloggers for more innovative and interesting ideas that you oughta know!

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Tanesha B. Forman

I'm a current middle school administrator who loves breaking down complex topics and providing opportunities for educators learn, reflect, practice, and implement methods that foster equity and anti-racism. I believe we win together!

Behind the Blog

Hi, I'm Tanesha.

I’m a current middle school administrator who loves breaking down complex topics and providing opportunities for educators learn, reflect, practice, and implement methods that foster equity and anti-racism. I believe we win together!