The Best of Livewire: Practical Classroom Activities for Elementary and Middle School Students is a collection put together from the original Livewire publication. It has three sections: the first focusing on primary, the second on intermediate age students and the final on the middle school grades. I found several of the activities to be ones I could take right into my classroom and use.

One activity I liked would work well in the beginning of the year. Students list and share three experiences or things they know about with a partner, they choose one of the experiences from their list and write a detailed account of it. During a sharing time student writers share their pieces and the audience asks questions. An example question would be; what part of my story did you like, or what would you like to know more about? I thought these introduced the process of response groups in a non-threatening way and gets students thinking of ways to respond to a peer's writing.

There were several activities that engaged students in descriptive writing. One activity had students writing descriptions of objects without naming the object and then having readers guess what object was being described. When everyone in the class had completed their "riddle" the teacher made a book and the class could then read their riddles to another class. I thought this would work well with older students doing the writing and then sharing with students in a younger grade.

I made a mini-lesson sheet from the activities I thought would work well with my fourth grade students. In addition, I added in additional ideas to extend the lesson. In the "People Sentence" lesson, students are given a card to hold with a single word printed on it. They are then told to work with the group and arrange themselves into a proper sentence. After they are arranged ask the rest of the class if they created a sentence. Students can then try making another sentence out of the same words but in a different order. The class can then try to create a question out of the words. Additional activities could be to identify parts of speech, make nonsense sentences out of the words, or challenge them to remove a word and construct a new sentence.

A final activity I would like to use explores point of view. After reading a story, discuss it for understanding. Next have students choose a character from the story and have them retell the story from the point of view of that character, not just a description of action but how the character felt and thought about events in the story.

The Best of Livewire offers practical activities I can use to engage and encourage writing. I appreciated how activities in this book focused on different aspects of writing and not just on writing a "good" story. Young writers need a variety of opportunities to develop their skills as writers.