Creative Writing with Emoji Prompts

What kid does not love emojis? I came across this website byrdseed.com/emoji and thought this would be a great lesson for my students. I feel strongly that our kids don’t have enough creative writing time, so I wanted to give them time to dig deep into their creativty. I recently introduced my students to their Google accounts, so I thought this would be a great way for them to explore writing in Google Docs. I instructed students to open their documents and then create a new tab so they could go back and forth from the emoji prompts to their document. The kids absolutely loved this project and the stories they wrote were creative, witty, and fun to read.

This is what the emoji prompts look like once you start clicking “and then”

How It Works:

Each time you click “and then” users get a new emoji to include in their story. I had my students take screenshots of their emojis when they were finished and include them in their document under their title. Additionally, I had the students underline the word that corresponded to the emoji they used. I found it interesting how students interpret what the emojis are…because they certainly are open for interpretation! Here are a few samples (screenshots) from some of my students! Super fun writing activity and they all gave it two enthusiastic thumbs up! This lesson combines lots of useful technology techniques with creative writing.

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Match Up Partners with Emojis

If your classrooms are like mine, then you know that whenever you say “pick a partner,” kids automatically start looking around the room to make eye contact with their future partner.  Often times they want to work with the same partners time after time. I was recently talking to a friend of mine who is an AMAZING 4/5 grade teacher in San Diego, Dena Glynn (@Glynn_ed), and she mentioned that she matches kids up using emojis from an Emoji Memory Game. I thought this was a great way to get kids partnered up at random. So, instead of going out to buy the game, I decided to create my own. You can download the PDF I created (emoji-matches) which includes 42 cards.

If you want to make something like this on your own, here’s how I did it!

1. I used Keynote and changed the size of my slide to a custom size to view my slide in portrait rather than landscape. Change the size of the document to 768×1024.
2. I added shapes for the background of the emojis and made sure my emojis were brought to the front of the shape.
3. One of my favorite sites is copypastecharacter.com and there you will find many of your favorite emojis. I like using this site rather than emojis within the keyboard on the Mac for projects like this.
4. After your cards are complete, print them out and laminate them! You could also use these cards to play a fun memory game!
5. In addition to creating these fun memory cards, there are so many other uses for using symbols and emojis from this website! Here’s an older post, where I wrote about creating rebus puzzles using emojis! Try it out! 😀