The Best Part of Me is a beautiful book written by a number of young children. These young authors write about a specific body part that they have. Most of the kids wrote about their favorite body part; however, many of them chose to write about a useful body part or even a part that they disliked.

I’m always on the hunt for creative writing prompts for kids so after seeing a number of creative writing activities centered around this book, I knew I had to give it a try with my students. I searched all over the internet for The Best Part of Me Writing Activity until I finally just created my own. I hope this blog posts helps you and inspires you to do this activity with your students.

The Lesson

Teaching the lesson was pretty straightforward and I suggest that you don’t add too many requirements and parameters. I wanted this writing assignment to be a natural and creative way for my students to express their thoughts.

I began the lesson by reading a few of my favorite pages and then I let my class pick one or two. You could spread this out over the course of a couple lessons to keep ideas flowing and a daily stream of “mentor texts.”

Afterwards, I asked my students to pick 3 body parts that they wanted to write about. I told them it could be a part they were thankful to have, a body part that they loved, or a body part they felt insecure about and wanted to feel more love towards it. One of my students chose their brain, because it helped them solve problems and think of interesting inventions.

Some of my students perform better when they are allowed to just free write and get all of their ideas onto paper. However, most of my students enjoyed using a graphic organizer to assist them. This graphic organizer included a box for each body part and then a spot for the three reasons they appreciated and loved that body part.

The following day, I taught a mini-lesson on figurative language. I encouraged them to include figurative language in their writing, as many great authors do. Students had a lot of fun describing their hair as spaghetti or saying their legs are like tree trunks.

Finally I asked students to type their writing on Google Classroom.

The Design

When I started this project, I was looking forward to displaying them in the hallway. I wanted each photo to be square and black and white so they would fit together perfectly.  I took my students photos directly on my iPhone and changed the filter to black and white. Afterwards, we edited the photos in Microsoft PowerPoint.

I changed my slide size to a square (such as 4×4 or 10×10) depending on how large you’d like your photos to be. Next you will be asked whether you want to scale your photo – the answer is yes.

Afterwards I inserted the photo followed by a text box and pasted their paragraph inside. I changed the background color of the text box to white to make their writing pop.

**To insert a text box – click “Insert” and then click “Text Box.”

I loved the way this writing activity looked once the entire class was finished. The students did a great job and it was an awesome activity to encourage self-love.

If you are looking for other creative writing lessons, you can find more here.

If you are interested in what product I used during this process, you can find it here.