Favorite Journal Prompt

One of the creative teachers who attended our spring conference suggested we share favorite journal prompts in English Notes.  If you will please share one of your favorite prompts, this regular feature can continue!!

Guided Freewriting Marathon 

Grade Level: Any

This set of journal prompts can be used at any time with any age group.  It's your way of getting to know your students in the fall; it can be an excellent way to keep their minds working when spring breezes are calling from the windows; and I have also used it as one of the beginning steps in a collected memoir project.

For this guided writing, I tell students they must keep their pen moving until the timer rings--I set the timer for three minutes with students new to my classroom and gradually inch the time upward to five minutes as I notice more writers still writing furiously when the timer chimes.

You can read each topic, write it on your board, use an overhead, or a projection TV with your computer.  After the first writing, I give students the option of continuing to write on the first topic if they were not finished when time was up; some students then write about each topic on their own schedule.  These prompts keep students writing for the majority of a 50-minute period, with a few breaks in between to re-read and rest.

As for the book in which I found these prompts, I no longer remember, but I do know they are "borrowed."

	What are your earliest memories of reading and writing?  Write a flashback or jump into a time machine to go back as far as your memory takes you.
	Now be specific.  Do you remember the titles of books you read? plot lines? a story or a book you wrote?  Elaborate.
	Reflect on why these memories are still in your memory bank.  What makes them memorable?  Why have these memories stayed with you?
	What do you remember about the importance of reading and writing in your family when you were quite young?  How has that value changed or stayed the same since then?
	How have all these experiences made you the reader-writer you are today?

Contributed by Nancy Kampfe, Bennett County High School, Martin