Wondering What to Write in Your Writer's Notebook?

Here are five possibilities:

1. Find an object that's important to you. Describe every detail of it. Tell the story of how it came to be important to you.
2. Take a line for a walk; find a book that you like and copy down a line from the book (make sure to say where it came from!). Use that line to make up your own story or poem.
3. Draw a doodle of an island. Name the features. Tell an adventure story about the island.
4. Go outside. Sit quietly for five minutes. Describe every sound that you just heard.
5. Tell a family story. Think about the stories that your family likes to tell over and over. Choose one and write it down (remember to only tell stories that are yours to tell. A particularly embarrassing story about a sibling is probably not the best choice).

And if those don't work, try going to this First Line website and see if it's useful for you.

Useful Questions to Ask Kids About Books

1. If you were to make a movie about the book, what would you change? Who would you cast in the book?
2. What if happened differently?
3. If you met in school, would you want to be friends? Why?
4. Why do you think made that choice?
5. What do you think is going to happen next. Why?
6. That event in the book reminds me of when happened to you. 
7. What if and met? What would happen?
8. What made you choose this book?
9. If you could change something in the book, what would it be?
10. What choices by
    made sense? Which ones didn't?

Writing Memory

The good:
When I was in second grade, a dear friend and I wrote a song together. My teacher, who played the guitar, helped us put the words to music. The song was called, "Let's Go See a Beaver Dam." We taught the song to the other students in the class, and then we all sang it together while another teacher recorded us. Then, MY SONG was played on the radio. I remember how much fun it was to come up with the lyrics and how special my friend and I felt when we got to stay inside during recess for a composing session. When I heard my song on the radio, I felt like a real writer. I was so proud. I'm positive that my feelings about that moment fueled my in-school writing for ages.

The bad:
In sixth grade, there was a girl who was incredibly mean. She had been picking on me for ages, and I decided that I would get back at her. My weapon? A note. I started writing it in science class, and I remember that I poured all the feelings I had into that note: anger, bewilderment, powerlessness, sadness. Then my teacher saw me writing. He took the note. He didn't say anything about it. He just kept teaching, but he had MY NOTE in his hand. At the end of class, I ran out of the room and headed back to my homeroom teacher's classroom. It wasn't over, though. At the end of the day, my homeroom teacher pulled me aside. My science teacher had shared the note with her. My homeroom teacher spent fifteen minutes telling me how horrible of a person I am and how in all her days of teaching, she had never seen such an unkind piece of writing. I didn't even bother to tell her about the bullying. I just let her yell at me and went to catch my bus home. I didn't cry until I got on the bus.

(Note: these two paragraphs are writing memories for my students to use as examples for their English homework. I chose one happy memory and one not happy memory. Why? Brandt did an amazing study where she asked people to tell her their earliest reading memories and their earliest writing memories. Overwhelmingly, people's earliest reading memories were positive. People's earliest writing memories? Not so much. When students mine their feelings about writing, it helps them think about why they might have developed preconceived notions about whether or not they are good writers)