Ep 52: Generating Writing Ideas was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the latest audio-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Sonix is the best audio automated transcription service in 2021. Our automated transcription algorithms works with many of the popular audio file formats.
Hey, teachers, if you have a classroom and a commute, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Rachael, and I want to ride along with you each week on your ride into school. This podcast is the place for busy teachers who want actionable tips, simple strategies, and just want to enjoy their job more. Let's go. Hey there, let me ask you a question.
Have you ever been guilty of spoon feeding your students ideas for what to write about when they claim they have nothing to write about? We all have those students who, when you tell them to go ahead and get writing, they sit there and stare at the wall and say, "I don't know what to write about". You give them an idea or two or sometimes help them write their entire story by verbally telling them what they should put on the paper. Yeah, I've been there too. My hand is in the air and I have been guilty more than once of spoon feeding my students ideas when they say they have nothing to write about. You know what? Sometimes we do need to give students a topic to write about because it's important that they have those skills that they can take any topic that we give them and craft some writing pieces on that topic. However, we also want to be able to give our students the freedom to write about their own topics of interest and be inspired on their own for what to write about. That's what makes them love writing and enjoy it in the first place. More often than not, when we give our students the freedom to write about what they want to do and give them time to explore their own interests, they come up with things that we would never have dreamed or imagined they would put down on paper, and sometimes they blow us away. It's important that we give them more opportunities like that where they can come up with their own ideas and craft their own writing pieces. In today's episode, I want to give you some writing strategies that you can pass along to your own students for generating their own ideas for writing.
Let's begin. One of the easiest ways to help students come up with their own ideas is to do what I call 'picture inspiration'. We've all heard the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words", and this first writing strategy puts that phrase to work. Writers can get inspired in the images that they see on a daily basis. A specific image might spark an idea for a character or a story plot that can be used in their next writing piece. Now, these pictures can really come from anywhere. You might even take some magazines and cut out some interesting pictures and create a binder of a collection of those pictures. I have one resource that I've used year after year that has always sparked some amazing stories. It's using the book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, it's by Chris Van Allsburg, I will link to it in the show notes. This book is essentially a treasure trove of writing prompts. It's a book that's loaded with images that just beg for questions to be asked and for stories to be written. Now, unfortunately, on a podcast, it's very hard for me to actually show you what these images look like. I'm going to have to be that "thousand words" instead of the picture for you today. I'll try to describe a couple of the pictures that you might find in this book. There's this one picture with a man holding a chair over his head as if he's about to slam it down on the floor. He's looking down on a rug that clearly has something underneath the rug. Now, you and I might say that it's a mouse or a cat. It's something small, but the man looks very concerned about it. He's holding this chair above his head as if he's going to whack it down on whatever is moving underneath the carpet. By looking at this picture, students could be inspired to write a story maybe titled "The Mysterious Bump under the Rug" or something along those lines. The options and the ideas could be endless. Another picture shows a woman who's carving a pumpkin. It's not your average pumpkin. If you look at the picture, the pumpkin is glowing and the woman has these really crazed looking eyes wondering what the heck is making this pumpkin glow. That is another picture that could really spark some creativity in a student's writing piece. Finally, there's this third picture that I love from this book, The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, where there is a group of kids who look and appear to be sitting on a train car. It's not a covered train cart, it's open. They're sitting on this railroad track that's surrounded by water. As you look down the railroad track, the railroad track disappears. There's a little bit of mystery as to what's going to happen when the kids get to the end of the railroad track. As you can see, these types of pictures, these are all mystery themed pictures. It doesn't have to necessarily be mystery themes for this specific strategy of picture inspiration but this will certainly peak the curiosity and have potential to be written into a story. If you want to get your hands on that book, I'll link to it in the show notes and you can grab it off of Amazon or you can check out your local libraries. It's a great book, especially if you are beginning a writing unit on mystery writing, and would be a perfect starter activity for that unit.
Now, if you want to turn this into a small group activity, you can collect several copies of the book. Or if you have a scanner or printer at your school and you just want to make multiple copies of some of the pictures in the book, you can provide each student with either the book or the copies of the pictures and then put several Post-it notes with each group and then have students look through the images. On each Post-it note, they can write an idea, a question, or a potential story plot line that the picture inspires. Then after the end of the activity, students are going to walk away with several ideas for their next writing piece. That's my first strategy, picture inspiration. Start looking for pictures around your classroom or on the Internet. Print them out and keep a book of pictures that students can use for idea inspiration.
The second idea is something that I call 'watermelon seed writing'. Now, it's funny because as I'm telling you this writing strategy, I'm looking at the activity sheet that I would use with my students. It was called watermelon seed writing and it has an image of a watermelon slice on it. Inside the watermelon slice are the black seeds that you and I most likely picture when we think about watermelon. I can't remember the last time that I actually bought a watermelon with black seeds in it, they only come seedless now. You might have to give your students a little bit of a history lesson about what watermelon used to look like, you know, back in our day. Anyway, I love using the analogy of the watermelon when it comes to organizing our thoughts and what we're going to be writing about. So many times we tell students to write a story, anything that they want, and the story is all over the place. They talk about this and then they talk about that and then they move on to the next thing. When really, all of those individual ideas in their stories could be stories themselves. The watermelon seed writing activity helps to break down a larger topic into smaller thoughts that could then be its own story. When you use the watermelon as the analogy, you teach students that the watermelon is the larger idea or topic that they'd like to write about. Then each seed inside the watermelon is a smaller, specific thought that relates to the larger topic and that each of those smaller seeds can be individual stories. Now, when I introduce this strategy, I use the book, "The Relatives Came" by Cynthia Rylant. Again, I'll link to it in the show notes if you want to check it out yourself. In the story, the narrator recounts a time when her relatives came to visit. She goes into great detail on what they did when the relatives came, how they acted, what they talked about and so on. The book shows students how to expand one simple moment. In the case of this book, it's the time when relatives came to visit and expand that into an entire story. Then I use the watermelon analogy to illustrate it. Now you can draw a large slice of watermelon on a piece of paper or put a picture of it up on your smart board or your whiteboard, whatever it is that you use in your mini lesson. You can provide the same picture to your students on a graphic organizer where they can actually write their ideas down, their 'watermelon seed' ideas and keep track of it for their own writing pieces. I'll go ahead and put an image of what the watermelon seed writing graphic organizer looks like so that you can get a better idea of how this works. If you already have my "Getting Started in Writers Workshop" unit, you already have access to this graphic organizer along with some other things that I'm mentioning in this episode. Make sure you go back into that unit and find if you already have it. If you want to check out the unit, I will link to it in the show notes. After I've read the story, "The Relatives Came" by Cynthia Rylant, I have students practice this strategy on their own. I give them the graphic organizer. I encourage them to come up with a larger topic. This topic represents the watermelon slice piece and then I have them break down that larger topic into smaller specific thoughts or ideas. For example, a student might write, "The larger topic would be my summer vacation." That's the watermelon slice. The individual seeds might look something like this, one seed idea might be "going swimming at the beach". They could write an entire story about what it was like to swim at the beach, what the weather was like, what the waves were like, or perhaps they built sand castles. Those are all ideas to expand on their one seed idea. Another seed idea for the larger topic, "my summer vacation" might be visiting grandma and grandpa, and they would write an entire story with details all about that specific moment in time. Maybe another seed idea might be a sleepover that they had at their friend's house. They take their large idea, "My summer vacation", and they break it up into smaller seed ideas that could be individual stories. That is my watermelon seed writing strategy to help them generate their own ideas from a larger topic and break those larger topics down into smaller ideas. Let's keep going.
A third strategy to teach your students how to generate their own ideas is to get inspired by what authors have already written about. This can go for both fiction and non-fiction. Students might read a book about sharks, and they could be inspired to write a poem about sharks, including information that they've learned from the book. They could also be inspired to write a sequel to a book that they've completed. They could ask themselves, 'if this book were to continue, what might happen next?', and then they could write the story of their ideas. They could borrow a character from one of their favorite books and write a story with that character in it. There's lots of ideas that they can get from other books that they read to inspire their own writing.
Now I have one final writing strategy they use to help students come up with their own ideas and actually might be the most obvious. I teach students that when all else fails to write about what they know, encourage them to think about their own personal memories or topics that they know a lot about. If you asked my daughter right now what she knows a lot about, she might tell you Star Wars and could very easily come up with some stories all about Star Wars. Maybe they have a special skill or talent or hobby that they really enjoy that they could write about. It doesn't have to be a narrative story. It could just be a writing piece explaining their skill, their hobby, their talent to other people. Everyone has a story inside them.
Now, before we wrap this up, here is a bonus tip. Once students have developed the skill of generating their own ideas using one or more of these strategies, they'll begin coming up with multiple ideas at one time. Encourage them to keep those ideas written down so that they're never at a loss for what to write about. Now, several episodes ago, I talked about my writer's notebook and I linked to that episode in the show notes. In the back of my students writer's notebook, I had them keep a sheet of paper called 'Writing Ideas'. Any time they have an idea or a spark of inspiration, they write it down. Then whenever they needed to come up with a new idea, they would consult their writing ideas sheet in their writer's notebook and then boom, they have something that they can write about without having to sit there, twiddling their thumbs until an idea strikes.
All right, let's wrap this up. You and I both know how tempting it is to spoon feed students ideas for their next writing piece, but we really want to give them strategies that let them come up with their own ideas. Let's quickly run through those strategies one more time. The first strategy is called picture inspiration, where you might have a collection in a binder of all sorts of different pictures that students can thumb through and be inspired to write a story based on what they see in the picture. Then there's the watermelon seed writing. This is when students come up with a larger topic. It could be something that they're good at, some moment in time. Then from that larger topic, they develop seed ideas, smaller, specific thoughts from that larger topic, and then write an individual story for each of their seed ideas. The third idea is to generate ideas from other authors and use books that they've already written to inspire their own writing pieces. Finally, we encourage students to write stories and writing pieces about what they already know, what they are already good at or have a hobby or interest for. They can write stories just on those. I also mentioned several resources, including some anchor text books that you can use with your students and some printable resources like my watermelon seed graphic organizer that's included in my "Getting Started in Writers Workshop" unit, which I will link to. As well as my writers notebook that has that sheet where students keep track of all their ideas in one place and always have that as a tool when they need a new writing idea. I will link to all of that in the show notes. You can get there by heading to classroomnook.com/podcast/52.
All right guys, have a great rest of your day, a good start to your week and I will meet you back here again next week. Same time, same place. Bye for now.
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