1. Give students a handout you’ve prepared with these questions:

-What kind of animal are you?
-Where do you live?
-What do you dream about?
-What do you do?

2. Ask them to write a poem about this animal, using their answers to the handout questions.

From the WritersCorps publication “Jump Write In!”

1. Ask students to write from a baby’s perspective, inside the womb. (You might play Jimi Hendrix’s song, “Belly Button Window.”)

2. You can expand on this exercise by asking students to write from the baby’s point of view at ages two, five, and ten.

This lesson is from the WritersCorps book “Jump Write In!”

1. Bring in objects with distinctive colors or swatches of colorful cloth or paint.

2. Ask students to write a poem or story in which they describe one of the colors — the color, not the object — for a blind person.

This lesson is from the WritersCorps book “Jump Write In!”

1. Bring in portraits (on postcards or from magazines) of a variety of faces.

2. Ask students to choose one that interests them.

3. Ask students to write a poem from this person’s point of view. Remind them that they are not writing their opinion about this person, but rather, imagining how this person pictured sees the world.

Lesson is from the WritersCorps book “Jump Write In.”

Prompts can serve as effective catalysts for writing by jump-starting students’ creativity and free-associative thinking. One quick way to begin a lesson is to throw out an opening line, and to let your students complete it by writing a poem or prose piece. You can make up the opening line or choose one from a poem, short story, or play. Some teachers like to select a line that speaks to some query or interest the students are discussing (race, family, neighborhood, and so on).

Here are some prompts or first lines WritersCorps teachers have used:

Don’t tell me. . .
Don’t ask me. . .
When I look in the mirror, I see. . .
The voices in my head are telling me. . .
I wish I had. . .
I wish I could. . .
When I woke up this morning. . .
You should never have forgotten this. . .
I was not supposed to remember. . .
I never thought. . .
I am the kind of man or woman who. . .
I’m scared. . .
I see. . .
In my past life I was. . .

The following is a student poem in which the prompt became the poem’s title.

In My Past Life

I
was an elephant
running across the
plains of the desert
my feet pounded out
the hot beat
under the dry sun
In my past life
I was water
I came up from the ground in trickles
and rushed over
its parched surface
the zebras drank me
and gazelles
passed through me
In my past life
I was the sand
at the feet of the pyramids
I stuck to the toes
of the men who dragged
heavy rock over my back
In my past life
I was a beetle
and women picked me up
and put me into their pockets for
good luck
In my past life
I was a sound
I was the whisper of the mother
who put her child to sleep hungry
In my past life
I was the child
that watched my mother cry
because this was not the life she chose
But in her next life she will be the gazelle
and I will be the grass
and I will feed her and she will run free
away from the cold cement walls
who know her too well.

– Gabby Cole, age 17
Poem is from a 1999 WritersCorps chapbook at ArtSpan/Inner City Public Art Projects for Youth

Lesson is from the WritersCorps book “Jump Write In!”