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More Thoughts
A Freewriting Journal(in color)

More Thoughts
A Freewriting Journal

What is freewriting? According to Wikipedia freewriting is "a prewriting technique in which a person writes continuously for a set period of time without regard to spelling, grammar, or topic. [It] helps writers overcome blocks of apathy and self-criticism."

More Thoughts and its companion journal, My Thoughts, can be used in a variety of ways, but the main point is to encourage students to write and enjoy doing it.

There are 80 journal pages in More Thoughts, and each page has a brief, open-ended written prompt and a colorful, evocative illustration. An additional 7 pages have no written prompt - only an illustration (a unicorn, a sick girl, a boy swinging, a dinosaur, an iguana, and a manga girl and boy). All the student has to do is fill the pages with words, sentences, and thoughts - all without fear of a grade or lots of red marks on their words and sentences. At the back of the book, for each page/prompt there is a small space for you, the teacher, to write a very brief response - "Is this true?" "What a beautiful scene!" "This is really very funny!"

The prompts include reflections on personal memories and feelings, thoughts about cars and digital technology, food, fantasy, wild and pet animals, love, nature, the environment, and twelve brief poems.

A sampling of prompts from More Thoughts:

• What is your best memory of a past holiday?
• If you had a robot, what would you want it to do for you?
• Do clowns make you laugh? Why or why not?
• What do you think or do when you see a rainbow?
• This alien visited your classroom and described life on its planet. What did it tell you?

So have your students write away - a page a day.

An extra resource: When using the journal, your students will enjoy fragments of several poems. You may want to share the complete poems with them, or enjoy them yourself. Here are links to the poems:

• page 70: Langston Hughes: Let the rain kiss you
• page 71: Robert Frost: I have been one acquainted with the night
• page 72: Li Jung/A.A. Burrows: My river grows dark and still at night in the fall
• page 73: Emily Dickinson: There is no frigate like a book
• page 74: Edgar Allan Poe: The Raven
• page 75: Nursery rhyme: As I was going up the stair...
• page 76 Shel Silverstein: Tree House
• page 77: Anonymous: Today is a smooth white seashell
• page 78: A.A. Burrows: Fall is winding down
• page 79: Walt Whitman: Miracles
• page 80: Henry Van Dyke: Time is...

Other writing prompts from Pro Lingua:

By Morey and Schafer
My Thoughts
Talk and Write

Writing Inspirations
TalkAbouts
Surveysfor Conversation
Improvisation