Revising: Writing Stronger Introductions & Conclusions + Freebies

I wanted to share some of the revising strategies we worked on earlier as a class to make writing pieces even stronger.

Students have used our ARMS Anchor Chart to work on the middles of their stories-- changing old, dead words to more descriptive, sensory words and taking out or moving parts that don't fit-- but now we're on to how we can make our introductions and conclusions the best they can be.

I have loved using my Story Starter Doodles for our "Hooking the Reader" Anchor Chart and the work that comes from the kids on the accompanying worksheet was enough to convince me to work on something similar for conclusions.

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Here's a picture I snapped of a girl in my class hard at work:

I found a beautiful anchor chart (actually, this site has TONS of beautiful anchor charts!) that captured some of the best ways to end a piece of writing. I used most of them in my packet and included the little doodle guys doing something similar to what the strategy is.

Click the picture to get this FREE download from my TpT Store

Each of these little doodles comes in a larger size as well for you to make an anchor chart for your classroom, just like the Introduction chart HERE.

I had the kids choose three strategies from both of the pages to try out (we worked on intros one week and conclusions the next). After they had tried out three, they picked the best one to use as their intro and either removed their old sentence or revised it a bit to fit.

I will tell you, as a teacher, it was much more interesting to read their pieces after this activity-- so it doesn't just help your littles become better writers, it helps you maintain your sanity as you grade 20-30 of them ;)

If you're interested in either of these packets, they are available for FREE in my TpT Store. The introduction doodle packet can be found HERE and the *new* conclusion doodle packet can be found HERE.

Do you have any other strategies for ending a piece of writing in an interesting way?