Description | Exposition | Narration | Opinion | Persuasion | All
Give your middle school students something intriguing to write about, whether they are reluctant, eager, or somewhere inbetween.
Free printables for how to create a paragraph, free tutorials on proofreading or in-text citations, current events, asking what they would read to a dog {and other important opinions}, story writing, and much more—you’ll find it all here.
Looking for engaging prompts for your teens? You’ll find those here. >>
Interested in writing prompts for the whole family? Could you use an assortment of prompts bundled together for certain topics or for varying grade levels? Free tutorials and printables included. Find them all here. >>
Thanks for visiting the Middle School Prompts page. If you have a prompt you would like to submit, please contact Sharon Watson.
Create a Character from a Photo
You want to create a character for your story, but you’re stuck. You can’t think of one.
Keep reading to find out one trick that will give you oodles of ideas.
As readers, we find out about characters by what they do and say, what others say about them, what they look like, and what they wear. For instance, if a character (more…)
Proofreading: Three Methods to Make it Easier
Proofreading is never easy. Anyone who says it’s easy is trying to sell you something or has never actually tried it.
If we can’t make it easy, at least we can make it easier for our troubled, weeping students. In fact, with these three tips, you can change it from a job that requires the strength of a backhoe to one that uses a garden trowel.
Many professional writers use the first two methods in their own writing, and so can your students. The third one is exclusively for students.
The Talking Shoes
When was the last time your shoes talked to you?
Anthropomorphism is a word for “in the form of a human.” It’s close to the term personification, and if you mix them up, it’s okay by me.
Anthropomorphism means giving human attributes to something that is not human. For instance, the Toy Story movies use anthropomorphism to give life to the toys, as do all the Transformer movies and any other movies or stories in which animals or objects talk, laugh, plan, and do other things humans do.
An example of someone’s shoes taking on the human characteristic of speech occurs in Alexander McCall Smith’s Blue Shoes and Happiness. This passage comes just after the character believes she has made a terrible mistake with her fiancé and might have lost him: (more…)
Create a Warning
Did you know that you should not spray Windex in your eyes? You did?
But did you also know that you should not use hair coloring as ice cream topping? Hmmm? Did you? Or that your TV’s remote isn’t dishwasher safe?
These and other crazy warnings (more…)
Help Your Students Avoid These Three Mistakes in Persuasive Writing
It’s easy for our students to make these common mistakes in persuasive writing. I’ve seen them in any number of newspapers and magazines in letters to the editor, and they abound in student essays. I’m guessing you have seen them as well.
I won’t keep you in suspense. Here’s the list: (more…)
The Introduction’s Super Power
Introductions can be boring. Super boring.
Young writers think they have to fight with a blank piece of paper for that first, amazing sentence before they write anything else, and so they get stuck.
Cue the tissues. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
A mom recently asked me to look at her son’s essay. He was entering a state-wide speech contest on the topic of responsibility and had written a solid essay—except for the introduction. He was going to put his listeners to sleep with it.
We were all sitting at his kitchen table. I turned to this teen and asked him, (more…)
Maya Angelou and Figurative Language
The world lost an important poet, writer, and human being in 2014.
On May 28, 2014, Maya Angelou, author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and other famous books, died quietly in her sleep. You can learn more about her here.
Maya Angelou wrote many memoirs about her fascinating life. One of them is The Heart of a Woman, from which the following two quotes are taken. (more…)
