350 Fabulous Writing Prompts: Thought-Provoking Springboards For Creative, Expository, and Journal Writing

350 Fabulous Writing Prompts: Thought-Provoking Springboards For Creative, Expository, and Journal Writing Paperback by Jacqueline Sweeney highlights creative, engaging, thought-provoking prompts for every day of the school year! More than 300 ways to motivate even your most reluctant writers. Topics include feelings, ethics, “imagineering,” quotations, humor, problem-solving, school situations, and so much more. For use with Grades 4-8.

Creative writing is any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes. Due to the looseness of the definition, it is possible for writing such as feature stories to be considered creative writing, even though they fall under journalism, because the content of features is specifically focused on narrative and character development. Both fictional and non-fictional works fall into this category, including such forms as novels, biographies, short stories, and poems. In the academic setting, creative writing is typically separated into fiction and poetry classes, with a focus on writing in an original style, as opposed to imitating pre-existing genres such as crime or horror. Writing for the screen and stage—screenwriting and playwriting—are taught separately, but fit under the creative writing category as well.

Also consider Coming to Know by Nancy Atwell. This  book is for teachers who are ready to put writing to work across the curriculum. It is written by teachers of grades 3 through 6 who, dissatisfied with encyclopedia-based approaches to content-area writing, asked their students to write as scientists, historians, mathematicians, and literary critics do – to use writing-as-process to discover meaning.

One of the subjects of this volume is report writing and ways to help children produce content-area writing that is as personal and meaningful as their stories of their own experiences. Students learn how to take notes in their own words, conduct interviews, record observations, design their first simple research project, select appropriate genres for their research, and apply the techniques of writing workshop in science, social studies, and reading classes.

In addition, Coming to Know explores the uses of academic journals, or learning logs. Children speculate, brainstorm, role play, correspond, predict, and ask questions about math, reading, science, and social studies – and demonstrate the power of informal writing to generate thinking. Coming to Know is also about the connections between reading and writing, the effects of using writing to learn on curriculum and planning, and the role of children’s literature in teaching science, social studies and math.