Here’s one way to make thinking about point of view more accessible to younger children. You could do a similar exercise with objects and people as well as animals.

1. Sit in a circle.

2. Ask students to pick an animal they would like to pretend to be.

3. Ask students to step one by one into the center of the circle and show how the animal moves, how it eats, and what kinds of sounds it makes.

4. After the student is finished performing, the other students guess what animal she was pretending to be.

5. Then the demonstrating student tells the group how old the animal was and where it lives — in the wild or inside a house.

6. Next, give students profile sheets with the following questions:

What is your animal’s name?
How old is your animal?
Who is in your animal’s family?
What does your animal wish for?
What is your animal scared of?
Where does your animal live?

7. Ask students to fill out these sheets, thereby developing more information about their animal characters.

8. If they wish, students can draw a picture of the animal and its home on the back of the profile sheets.

9. Ask students to write a story or poem using these profiles. Prompt them by suggesting that they could write a story about a time their animal wanted something and tried to get it, either succeeding or failing in the process.

From the WritersCorps book “Jump Write In!”

1. Create a deck of 10 word cards for each student in your class by writing the names of different body parts (nose, head, elbow, backbone, and so on) on individual three-by-five-inch index cards. It’s a good idea to choose the body parts yourself, thus avoiding any sexual or scatological references.

2. Ask each participant to select 5 cards from her deck.

3. Ask students to write a chant using the words on their cards:

Praise my head because…
Praise my feet because…
Praise my nose because…
Praise my spirit because…
Praise my backbone because…

From the WritersCorps book “Jump Write In!”

1. Ask students to write down 3 words across the top of a blank piece of paper: a noun, a verb and an adjective.

2. Then ask students to add 2 more words that don’t seem to have any connection to the other 3 words.

3. Ask students to pass their papers to the person on their right and write a poem using the 5 words they receive. The students should also title their poems with words they didn’t use in the text.

4. If there’s time they can repeat the process by passing the words to their left.

5. In another variation of this exercise, you choose a word as the title for a short poem. Each student writes a 5-line poem with this title. When they’re finished, ask students to pass their poems to the right. Now ask each student to choose one word from the poem he or she has received to use as the title for a new 5-line poem. Continue until the original poems have made their way around the circle.

From the WritersCorps book “Jump Write In!”