Back to School with Great Materials from Corbett Harrison

Help Support WritingFix and Always Write. Corbett Harrison: Dear teachers, writers, and friends, I've been scrambling to get our two new products from this summer posted at Teachers Pay Teachers in time for their big sale on Monday.  As with all our new products each summer, we like to offer them at a bargain price before they go full price.  Here's an update on new products that will be 10% off on Monday at our Teachers Pay Teachers Store! Our Monday Pun-Day materials are completely ready to go, including access to this accompanying resource page we've posted at Always Write; the website contains links to some of our most enjoyable (and completely complimentary!) "word play" assignments.  On Monday, they'll be available for 10% off. Our new Sophisticated Sentence materials are--sadly--not quite there yet, but they will be ready before August is over.  If you want a sneak peak of this product, you can still access these two sets of materials from Always Write that we shared in Texas in July: Session 1 & Session 2.  If you were planning to purchase this new resource, email me (corbett@corbettharrison.com), and I will send you the first three lessons early on this week so you can get started, and I'll make sure you get emailed when the full product is first posted with its preliminary discount price at TPT.   I apologize for the delay, but my University asked me to teach a new online course this September, and it has bogged me down a bit!  Thanks for understanding. Also on sale this Monday at TPT for 10% off: Our 8 Restaurant-themed writer's workshop menus, our collection of 573 writing prompts, our 18 Tier-2 Vocabulary Quick Poems to improve students' vocab during literature discussions and Socratic seminars, and our set of Grouping Cards with vocabulary and grammar-inspired transitional activities.   We sell products like the ones above to pay the fees it takes to keep Always Write and WritingFix online and clear of advertisements. I'd like to point out that we also feature some pretty great complimentary resources at Teachers Pay Teachers too.  Here are four of my personal favorites: Mentor Text Classification Materials!  Price = $0.00 Metaphor Classification Materials! Price = $0.00 A month's worth of our world famous Sacred Writing Time slides!  Price = $0.00 A set of six-trait bulletin board posters!  Price = $0.00 Enjoy your weekend!  If you're a bargain hunter, don't miss out on Monday's sale at TPT! --Corbett (& Dena) Harrison -- Always Write

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Nora Carpon's writing prompt suggestion

Nora Capron, a graduate student in the summer 2012 session of Teaching and Assessing Writing with the Six-Traits posted the following.

With regard to this week's readings, I really liked Donald Murray’s questions to help uncover possible topics on page 172:

What surprised me lately? What’s bugging me? What is changing? What did I expect to happen that didn’t? Why did something make me so mad? What do I keep remembering? What have I learned?

These would be fabulous to use in my Creative Writing class! Sometimes it’s tough for kids to “get the wheels greased” with their basic ideas. I agree with the point Dennis made in his lecture when he said people write best when they write what they know, and I think Murray’s prompts would serve as a very comfortable starting point to get the pens moving. I plan to use these prompts next year in the first few classes when we are generating ideas for our writing.

One idea I have to share is a free writing exercise I recently did as a student in a creative writing course I am taking this summer. The professor passed out a bunch of books to the class. Once each student had a book on his/her desk, the professor instructed us to open our book to a random page, close our eyes, point to a random line of text, read the line, write it at the top of our page and use this as our writing prompt. The sentence at the top of my page was “How embarrassing for him, some stoner overhearing.” Needless to say, this got the creative juices flowing very quickly!

I went from feeling overwhelmed with the pressure of generating a new idea to writing something original that flowed really easily. All I needed was a little inspiration, and it came from a source that I had all around me all the time—books! This exercise was a lot of fun and very useful. I will definitely use this exercise in my own Creative Writing class this year. Has anyone done a similar activity with their students? How would you describe this experience? What variations of this activity could also be done?