Whether we are in the physical classroom or learning remotely, students can spend a lot of time thinking about what they want to write. Often, it is not the writing part that slows them down - it is coming up with an idea. We have put together a resource you can share with students to minimise this challenge that you can download here. The prompts are designed to stimulate thinking and get pen to paper.

Before you give students the prompts, you may like to begin your lesson with one of these class activities:

1. Ask students to listen to a playlist that we have put together on Spotify that is inspired by ‘Autumn’. Ask students to share which song is their favourite, and why. This could a 100 word reflective writing exercise. You could also encourage students to listen to this playlist whilst going for a walk and taking in the colours of Autumn.

2. Have students to watch a short video called the Autumnal Collector . After they have watched the video, ask students to respond to the following questions:

   • What does Autumn represent in the story?

   • How does the narrator describe the setting? What words and techniques does he use?

   • What does the Autumnal Collector collect?

3. Ask students to describe the weather on any particular day. Most often, they will start with it’s ‘hot’, ‘cold’, ‘windy’ or ‘raining’. Ask them to come up with better adjectives to describe the weather - for example, instead of saying cold, they could say it is bitter or numbing. You could also ask students to come up with similes and metaphors to describe the weather - for example, rather than saying cold, they could say that the weather feels like stepping into a refrigerator, or the weather is trying to freeze our bones. You could use this activity any writing technique you would like to focus on, such as personification or alliteration.

4. Study a poem. Here is a collection of poems that you could use that includes the work of John Keats and Emily Bronte. You could also select any of the songs from the playlist to analyse.

Share the writing stimulus prompts with students. You can download it for free here as a pdf with working hyperlinks. Students can select one to use as their writing inspiration, or they could combine two (for example, they could collect artefacts and then write a poem about it).

You may even like to share some of the New York Times Writing Tips with students to get them started.