Share these writing, thinking, creativity, and storytelling activities with your middle schooler:
- Create Your Own Adventure: Using Glogster, make your own Choose Your Own Adventure story. Each part of the story will have its own "glog" (digital poster) that will be navigated by the choices your reader makes. To do this, add an image related to your story (your starting planet?) and some text. Give your reader a forced choice by having images or text saying that it will link your reader to the appropriate glog that has that part of the story. Get creative—add images, videos, audio, uploaded art, and more. The sky is the limit!
- Alien Adlib: Practice parts of speech and storytelling with fill-in-the-blank stories.
- Planet Quest: Explore California Institute of Technology’s Jet propulsion lab interactives.
- Field Trip to the Moon: Visit Google's site Google Moon and away you go. Take tours of Apollo missions to the moon narrated by Apollo astronauts, explore 3-D models of spacecraft, see footprints, watch TV footage from the day, and explore the surface! Extend the activity by writing a newspaper article about the experience.
- Moon Watching: Track the phases of the moon. Record your observations in a notebook or on a piece of paper.To add to your experiment, change a variable. Record observations about how the moon changes over a 24-hour period or across a season.
- Moon poems: Stars and moonlight have inspired many a poem. Take a virtual tour of the moon (above) and then read Cynthia Rylant’s Long Night Moon and let it inspire some poetry of your own!
- Extreme Planet Makeover: Make your own planet with this interactive. Adjust the presets and think about how you would make your planet habitable, learning about earth and other planets in the process.
- Go on to create a world with living organisms, using chemistry and physics along the way. Write about your creation.
- Solar System Switch-a-Roo: Can you unscramble the planet or make a new one of your own?
*There are many entrance points for these activities, and many different levels integrated into the sites themselves. In addition, the sites provide instant feedback and increased support for those who need it. Thus, both struggling learners and gifted/motivated learners will find a just right challenge in any of the above activities.
**While the sites listed here are free, many offer premium services for a fee. None of these activities described require paid memberships, but some require registration and logging in. Your child should have parent approval before doing so.