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.
Read MoreThe Hamburger Menu
I Believe . . .
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”:
Read More3 Ideas to Help Your Writers, and Only 2 of Them Are Crazy
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
Read MoreSo Long, Pluto!
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”:
Read MoreHow to Overcome a Reluctant Writer’s Resistance
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:
Read MoreFeeling Twitchy?
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:
Read MoreOne Sure-Fire Way to Create Writing Prompts for Your Students
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:
Read MoreLove and the Weather
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
Read MoreWhat Do You Do for Fun?
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?
Read MoreProof of Alien Life Beyond Earth
Famed physicist Stephen Hawking and others launched a $100 million program called Breakthrough Listen in their search for alien life beyond Earth. The search will begin with the one million stars closest to us in the Milky Way Galaxy and then expand into neighboring galaxies.
“We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth, so in an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life,” Hawking said.
They have a lot of listening ahead of them. That’s a lot of area to cover!
Would you like to win a cool million?
Read More
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