A five senses assignment is great for reporting on places or habitats. Rather than having students write an essay about a habitat, ask them to author a poem about it using their five senses. This requires students to do extensive research to determine what type of landforms, structures, or animals they might see; what types of agriculture they might taste; and so on. Using Pixie, students can support their poems with additional graphics, illustrations, and voice narration, enabling them to synthesize their research into a highly creative end product. Again, this type of assignment makes data dumping nearly impossible.

Similar to an ABC-style book, an associative letter report asks students to take what they know about a topic and organize the information around a specific letter. For example, a student assigned the letter “B” and Rosa Parks might write “B is for Rosa Parks because she was brave when she would not budge from her seat.”

This assignment incorporates reference skills by necessitating the use of a thesaurus and encourages problem- solving skills, especially when students have a difficult time finding words to describe their topics. You can even introduce ideas like alliteration to more advanced students to give them additional flexibility with their wordplay.

We use associative letter reports for Black History Month and make sure that each letter of the alphabet is represented. When the project is completed, all of the pages are bound together into a creative and informative book.

The “If…But” report is an exercise in comparing and contrasting, which plays a key role in both the Bloom and Marzano frameworks. In this style report, students compare two topics, such as animals, states, or people. For example, if a student is comparing alligators and crocodiles, they might write, “If I was an alligator, I would eat meat and live in fresh water. I would also use my tail and webbed feet to help me swim. Also, I would have a U-shaped jaw. But, I would not have a V-shaped jaw because crocodiles have that.” Since the report is written in first-person, this assignment deters students from simply copying and pasting content.

I often provide specific templates to simplify the process. I ask students to begin with “If I were” or “If I visited” to describe their first topic or place. Then, I ask them to use “But I would not” to describe the second topic. To differentiate for different grades and ability levels, I simply change the number of sentences required.