Do you know someone who does not or cannot speak?
Many reasons exist for someone not speaking. For instance, someone may be afraid to speak and be an elective mute. Some may have been born with physical problems that make it difficult or impossible to speak. Others may have lost the ability to speak due to an illness, which is what happened to Don. You can watch his story here.
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McDonald’s Big Mac. Burger King’s Whopper. Hardee’s Thickburger. Rally’s and Checker’s Big Buford.
Is your mouth watering yet?
Let’s celebrate hamburgers and cheeseburgers with a menu of writing prompt choices.
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I find writing prompts in the most unusual places, and this week’s prompt is no exception.
Have you ever eaten at a Fazoli’s restaurant? Their slogan is “Real Italian. Real Fast.” They may have the best breadsticks on the planet.
Their cups and breadstick papers are covered with sayings. I found this one on a cup with about ten one-liners like “Mom is not synonymous with waitress”:
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I understand at the outset of this article that the word “them” in my title is ambiguous. Does it stand for the writers or for the ideas?
As you can see, writing is hard. At least, that’s what students tell me.
It makes their hands hurt. They don’t know where to begin. They don’t know how to construct paragraphs. If they’re not interested in the topic, they can’t think of anything to write anyway.
The list goes on and on and is pretty much the same in all the classes I teach.
A number of moms confess to me that they’ve given up teaching writing. Some say that whenever they give their students writing assignments, crying is involved. (I assume it’s the students doing the crying, but I could possibly be wrong about that.)
Even in the weekly writing class I teach for high school homeschoolers, at least two students have
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Can you believe there’s a day named Pluto Demoted Day? It is August 24, when in 2006, Pluto was demoted from a planet to a dwarf planet.
Recent photos of Pluto by NASA’s spacecraft New Horizons have been fascinating. Here’s one of them, with a lighter shape informally named “the heart”:
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Are you encountering resistance when you ask your students to write?
Is there crying involved?
It is intimidating for students to stare down a blank piece of paper or an empty computer screen. Middle and high school students have revealed to me why they are negative about writing. Here’s what they have to say:
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It was a common practice long ago that travelers in inns slept in the same bed, even if they didn’t know one another. This seems strange to us and, yes, a little creepy now.
Here is a passage from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville in which the narrator Ishmael is telling us about how he decided not to sleep in the same bed with a harpooneer because Ishmael didn’t know how dirty the guy’s clothes would be (“his linen or woolen”) or even if he could trust him:
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I have a secret to tell you.
I’m not really sure I should. After all, it feels a little like a chef revealing the secret ingredient to a closely guarded family recipe, but I’m going to share it with you anyway.
As you may know, I create many writing prompts and wrote the daily writing prompts for SchoolhouseTeachers.com for over two years. That’s a lot of writing and a lot of prompts.
Where do I get my ideas? Here’s my secret:
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What do love and weather have to do with each other?
Quite a bit, it turns out. Forty-eight of The Beatles’ 308 songs mention some kind of weather, according to accuweather.com.
You can watch The Petersens’ version of “Here Comes the Sun” here. The song is written by George Harrison, formerly of The Beatles. You’ll quickly notice that the sunny weather is a metaphor for
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Some people like to put puzzles together. Others like to build forts, take hikes, or go camping. Some kids like to read or play a sport.
Derek Jeter, a now-retired New York Yankee, played baseball to have fun: “You gotta have fun. Regardless of how you look at it, we’re playing a game. It’s a business, it’s our job, but I don’t think you can do well unless you’re having fun.”
What do you do for fun?
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