I’m so excited to share a project in SIX years in the making, since before I ever even heard of TpT!
Long ago I started using picture prompts to get my students to write. Not your average picture prompts, totally random and fun picture prompts. Here is a quick peek at what’s in this file:
The point of these pictures is for the kids to write a story around the objects in the picture. They create a setting and a story for what they see. When I began using these types of prompts, I was drawing everything by hand! (I hadn’t yet discovered the beauty of clip art.) The problem with that was that sometimes my drawings looked nothing like what I intended or I would create awesome ones and lose the originals. Many months ago I finally thought about making these digitally with professionally drawn clip art! Such a no-brainer. So here it the final product:
I wish I could show you every example, but that would make for a very long post, so here are a few student examples with our pig and spaceship prompt:
I love how different they all end up!
Here is how I use them. Each week I focus on one or two things during writer’s workshop. The kids write in their notebooks every day. I tried taking all of those notebooks home to grade, but that wasn’t very efficient. So instead of doing that, I assign one a week and grade that. While grading I look for neatness, spelling, capitalizations, and my focus skill(s) for the week. From doing this I get more ideas to work on for writer’s workshop and get a good idea on how my kids are progressing. MUCH easier than grading 28 notebooks. I try to collect them all and bind them for each student at the end of the year. The parents love these keepsakes and I love seeing how much my kids have grown as writers throughout the year. I’ll assign some for fun and sometimes even a couple for homework or morning work. I love having a couple on hand in case I have time for some extra writing time or for sub days.
So far there are about 80 picture prompts in this set, but I will be adding more as the year progresses.