Rigorous argumentative, explanatory, or narrative writing prompts appear at the end of every play, paired text, fiction, poetry, and narrative nonfiction feature throughout the year, providing opportunities for students to plan, develop, and revise drafts across a wide range of tasks, purposes, and audiences. 

“Preparing to Write” guided-writing activities prepare students to respond to each of the writing prompts in the Student Edition. These graphic organizers to help students focus and organize their thoughts around a single featured skill from an article or story, e.g., inference, synthesis, theme, character, key ideas & details, compare & contrast.

The Short Write Kit accompanies every issue’s Short Read feature. This guided-writing activity walks students through the steps of constructed response—stating their claim, providing text evidence with commentary, and writing a conclusion.

The Essay Kit accompanies every issue’s Debate feature. This is a guided-writing activity that takes your student through the argument writing process step-by-step—forming their opinions, gathering evidence, writing, and revising. Don’t miss the valuable references materials at Scope Online such as “Checklist for Argument Essays” and “Great Transitions.”

The “Finding and Using Text Evidence” activity—part of every issue’s Core Skills Workout—guides students to finding, using, quoting, and paraphrasing relevant text evidence to support a claim using our paired texts feature in every issue. This activity comes in two levels, for easy differentiation.

The You Write It feature that appears in every other issue features a Q&A with an inspiring young person. Your students turn the interview into a three-paragraph article. You can model the activity with annotated and nonannotated examples of completed You Write It Interview activities found at Scope Online.

The You Be The Editor feature that appears in every other issue builds students’ grammar and writing skills in an authentic and meaningful way—a short, fascinating text is presented for which students will “be the editor,” improving the passage through the use of guiding prompts. Rather than correcting mistakes, students turn an okay piece of writing into a stellar one using the grammar tools in their growing toolkits.

The Grammar feature in every issue helps your students practice using commonly confused words. Don’t miss our “Grammar Hacks” videos and additional activities for reinforcement at Scope Online.

Behind the Scenes Videos allow students to meet the author of an article or story and walk through his or her writing process together.