“He was a multi-millionaire. Wanna know how he made all of his money? He designed the little diagrams that tell which way to put batteries in.”

Lessons for IDEAS  

Here are some common writing prompts that can be used for the writer's notebook. Many of these can be used again and again with different results each time. Note how these are prompts--they give the writer a starting place--but each writer will create their own topic. Too often what we call prompts are actually topics--the student is simply filling in support.

A-Z story -- First sentence starts with A, second starts with B, etc. DO NOT label your page a-z in a column. The writing should be written in paragraph form and try to make the A-Z pattern not-so-obvious. Remember, this is just to generate ideas and not meant to be turned into a complete or final piece.

Numbers: Pick any number and students write whatever they can come up with related to it.

Colors: Again, pick any color and writers create a piece that is generated from that color

Single Word: Words that can fall into several parts of speech are great, such as "Wind" (verb or noun) Let the students generate the topic based on however they think of the word.

Single word or phrase related to your novel/topic/currriculum: Instead of assigning a topic such as; "Write an essay on 3 characters in the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, who are motivated by fear and discuss how their rascism manifests in the novel" you can just write the word "racism" and ask students to think how this relates to what they have read. Of course they might take a totally different approach with that word but they will be creating their own thoughts from it, instead of trying to relate just to the topic assigned. Allows for more variety of thinking.

NOTE: THIS DOES NOT MEAN that you never give assigned topics such as the one listed. They need to be able to respond to a questions such as this--but too often that is the ONLY type of question we provide. They lose the ability to create their own ideas when this happens.

An image: Use any image, even a mundane one, to see what is generated.

Scents: Have an incense, candle, or a strong smell in the room. Don't let them see the source, just ask them to write whatever that smell makes them think of.

	TIP
	Without ideas, all the rest of the traits of writing are virtually useless. What good does excellent grammar do if you have nothing new to say? Spend the most time on IDEAS and all the others will fall into place. Better ideas make for better word choice, voice, organization, even conventions and sentence fluency because the writer will care more about what they write. Press students to find unique angles, new ideas, naunces that others don't notice. And what a treat--IDEAS are the FUN part to teach.

• Check out The English Teacher's Friend collection of 1000 Writing Prompts CD (6 powerpoints with 180 prompts--one for each day of the year for 6 years or grades 6-12

• Education Northwest has an extensive site for six traits materials, lessons, sample papers, and rubrics.

• Creative Writing Prompts.com is a site with 365 writing prompts. Let students (as a class) pick a number from this page and go with it.

 Documents

One Page Grammar/style issues 

Ideas Rubric

Student Version of Six Traits Rubric

Proofreading Marks