My StoryMaker

This is a great site to help kids create a story!
My StoryMaker lets you control characters and objects - and creates sentences for you! Once you are done with your story, you can print it out. You cannot go back and edit a story once you have ended it but, if you click "yes" when asked to share it with others, you can print it out again by entering the magic number it gives you in the box on the right. Stories are saved for one month...but you can save them as a PDF to keep forever.


I saw this site from a tweet from @Mray29. It was showcased at #TCEA.
I think this site has great potential for uses in elementary classrooms. Students select the scenery, characters, objects, and actions the characters do in their story. StoryMaker creates sentences for you or you can delete those and enter your own creations. It is VERY user friendly!
Check it out when you have time! If you have great ideas on how to use this with students, please comment below to share those ideas with others!

Shape Poems

There are several sites out there for free to create shape poems with your students. @ldenker shared this one today on Twitter that I had never seen before and looks promising. Students can choose a shape or draw their own and then choose words to fill it.
Another site for shape poems is by Read, Write, Think. This one also has pre-made shapes that students can choose from to create a poem. These can also be used to type out stories about various topics in case you aren't studying poetry.
These sites can be very beneficial in the classroom with language arts, or any subject. Try them and see what you think!