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catalysts for writing
catalysts for writing
You can use this strategy over and over again with personal photos as well as other images you find online, in a magazine, on the wall of your classroom, on the side of a bus. Or click on the Pinterest link that Sam S. found last year: http://www.pinterest.com/reallyrachel/pictures-as-writing-prompts/.
Spend some time studying the picture. List the details you are noticing: colors, textures, juxtapositions. What's outside the frame but still part of the story? Jot down what might have happened before, during, and after the picture was taken. Tell the story of the picture. Here's a picture I love: I took it in Boston Common in November 2013. What stories can it tell?
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"Dribble the page with the brilliance of your ballpoint pen." ~ Daniel Beatty in "Knock, Knock"
It was my 7th grade teacher who first told me I was a poet, though my mom had been calling me a writer for years. I spend a lot of time writing in a green spiral notebook. Like my son, my favorite color as a child was green. I copied down my favorite quotes and poems in careful handwriting, savoring their images and words and wisdom, just as I'd seen my mother and grandmother do, before you could get anything you wanted on the interwebs. Though the notebook is long gone, I still have the poems my 7th grade teacher wrote on, validating my mother's prediction that I was, indeed, a writer. I have poured out my heart in poetry since I was a child, dribbling the pages with the all the brilliance I can muster from my Pilot G-2 pen. The brilliance is not always evident in the content, but the act of writing daily polishes the gems embedded in the writing to a brilliant sheen. This is a notebook entry style you can do again and again. Just lift any line or passage from any text, including your own notebook entries, and write it at the top of a fresh page in your notebook. Then write for 15 minutes and watch the sparks fly!
Here are some great spoken word poems sure to burn some lines across your notebook pages. "Maskless" by Miles Hodges video & lyrics "Knock Knock" by Daniel Beaty video & lyrics "If I Should Have A Daughter" by Sarah Kay video & lyrics "When Love Arrives" by Phil Kaye & Sarah Kay video & lyrics "A Mother's Prayer For its Daughter" from Bossypants by Tina Fey audio & lyrics "Origin Story" by Phil Kaye & Sarah Kay video & lyrics Please share any spoken word poems you find that will help your fellow writers in the comments below. (I first learned this from Penny Kittle at her ICTE 2013 Keynote.) Write a response to the following poem. Begin: "Starting here, what do you want to remember?" And then fill in your own details. Source: http://www.williamstafford.org/spoems/pages/youreading.html
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AuthorMrs. Paulsen writes, reads, knits and shoots arrows. Archives
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