Visual Writing Prompts. Random Writing Prompt Generators. I Keep a Writer's Notebook alongside my Students. Do you? I began requiring journal writing way back in 1990--my first year of teaching. I had taken a methods class at my university that stressed the importance of having students keep journals to record daily responses to topics. I said, "Why not? " and every student from day one maintained a spiral-bound "journal" for me. Most students tossed their journals in the trash on the last day of class in June; they could have cared less about the responses they'd scribbled in there, and I knew they didn't care about their journals, yet I continued to use this daily practice for those first five or so years of teaching.
In the spring of 1998, thanks to my high school journalism students' hard work, I was awarded with a month-long, summer fellowship from C-SPAN in Washington, D.C., and the first thing the wonderful folks at C-SPAN asked me to do upon arrival was to keep a daily journal that documented my experience there. I have to be doing something right. The Literacy Shed - The Literacy Shed Home. Writing prompts. Inkle » inklewriter.