Would you like to inspire students to be better writers while you incorporate new strategies into your teaching to assess their scientific understanding? Katie Coppens’ new NSTA Press book, Creative Writing in Science, provides engaging literary exercises that use the world around us to inspire. Designed for grades 3–12, the book offers fiction, poetry, and playwriting prompts that help students increase both their writing skills and their science knowledge.

Each writing lesson outlines foundational science knowledge and vocabulary and connects to the Next Generation Science Standards. The lessons also introduce language arts skills such as developing characters; writing conflict; and using personification, narrative voice, and other literary devices.

In the lesson “Travel Blog About the Digestive System,” students must apply their knowledge and vocabulary related to the human digestive system to compose a blog post from the perspective of a bit of food on a journey through the human body. Students will capture all of the twists and turns and use personification to convey this trip of a lifetime.

In another unique lesson, students are asked to imagine what life would be like if the KT asteroid had never hit. How would our landscape look and what organisms would be thriving today? Students must consider what role evolution would have played, and what animals might have become extinct. Would dinosaurs be here? Would humans still be roaming Earth?

Additional ideas to get students thinking creatively include writing comics, diary entries, songs, and letters from the point of view of the Moon, rocks, atoms, and more! The 15 lessons cover life science, physical science, Earth, space, and engineering. 

This book is humorous and engaging, and your students will love approaching science from a new direction.

Want to get your creative juices flowing? Try the free chapter “Group Poem: Earth’s History.”

Check out Creative Writing in Science in the NSTA Press Store. 

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