Meghan Lin signed onto buncee with a plethora of ideas and a creative spirit that was unmatched. Her awesome buncee creations inspired us so much, and we are thrilled to have her as a guest blogger! Here’s her best advice about writing prompts, imagination in the classroom, & more:
As a writer, I’m used to the idea that sensory details bring writing to life. In writing, the memory of my grandfather lives not in the giant strokes of his life, but in his beaten, steel-toed work boots that sat by the front door like dinosaur husks. So as a teaching artist, I always try to give writing assignments in the context of some visual, sensory, or creative experience. When students have concrete details to anchor their writing, it’s clearer, better organized, and more vibrant. That’s part of the magic of arts integration.
But it’s not always possible or convenient to bring props to school. This is one of the many reasons to love buncee. Buncee offers a super-easy way to add vigor and rigor to even your most mundane writing assignments with arts integration. If you can google an image, video, or sound file, you can put it in a buncee and offer your students a more sensory-specific starting place for their writing.
Here are a few of the different kinds of writing prompts you can create with Buncee in your classroom.
Get those prior-knowledge gears turning with a writing hook or do-now. Consider this warm-up to the story Ally-Saurus & the First Day of School, by Richard Torrey (a great back-to-school picture book, btw).
Or this one, a lead-in to Lord of the Flies, by William Golding.
The Center Enrichment Prompt.
Consider creating a buncee creative writing center with prompts and group stories for enrichment and imaginative play. Offer an image as a story-starter, and students can continue the story individually or as a group. If you’d like students to each add a page to a group story, you can do this by creating a student username just for this story, and sharing the password with everyone. One good source for interesting and evocative starter images is poetry.
This buncee is based on the first line of W.D. Snodgrass’s poem, “W.D., Don’t Fear That Animal” (“My hat leaps up when I behold a rhino in the sky!”)
Play “telephone.” This is a great variation on the old “telephone” game that I (now, as an adult) frequently play at family get-togethers. You start with a statement, any statement. Here, I started again with the W.D. Snodgrass line. Then the next person illustrates. The person after that captions or describes the illustration – but they can ONLY look at the illustration, they can’t look at the original statement. Every subsequent player can only look at the last slide, and either caption (if it’s a picture) or illustrate (if it’s a statement). Then when it’s been sufficiently beaten to death, you all look at the whole sequence and have a laugh.
You can play it like this in a pass-the-tablet fashion, or, if you’d rather students do it on their own time, you can create a shared username and password just for the game. Every time a student adds a slide he or she has to move it to the top, so it’s the first one showing. That way the next student only has to look at the most recent slide. So the previous telephone buncee would actually look like this, and you would read it back to front when it’s finished:
You can play this game in small groups (recommend 5 minimum), or class-wide.
Writing Genre Prompts.
Need students to practice a specific writing genre, like news report, letter-writing, or dialogue? Add some concrete detailing to help them focus.
Content Integration Prompts
This is an area where buncee truly shines. It can be hard for students to really visualize certain concepts just from text. This is especially true in science, history, and literature. Help them out by providing the visual details they need to immerse themselves in the subject. In science, help students imaginatively visualize concepts like habitats and adaptation.
In literature, help students get into the mindset and experience of historical time periods by offering visual embellishments.
Similarly, in history, immerse students in visual and auditory details to help events come to life. This buncee about the War of 1812 includes the audio for Tchaikovsky’s Overture 1812. Have it playing in the background while students write.
Moving Forward – Creating Your Own Prompts
How to craft your own writing prompt? That depends on your content goals, and deserves a whole new blog post. Fortunately, Edutopia has a fantastic piece on crafting writing prompts here. Once you’ve decided on a prompt, how do you know if buncee is the right tool to deliver it? The key is in visualization. Whatever you want your students to write, ask yourself if a visual or audio aid would jump-start their imaginations. If the answer is yes, then this is a good moment to integrate buncee.
Yes, you could just google a supporting image, but the best part about using buncee is that you can mix and match several images and other media in a single slide or slide show. Is this a moment where you wish there was a 2-minute micro-documentary on your topic so that your students would understand better? Then this is a good moment for buncee. With buncee you can make your own micro-documentary about women’s suffrage in about the same amount of time that it takes you to reheat leftovers. Which was a sentence I’d ALREADY WRITTEN when buncee tweeted this micro-documentary on women’s suffrage the next day:
What can I say, great minds think alike! I made the War of 1812 buncee in approximately 7 minutes, and most of that was listening to different YouTube versions of the music until I found the recording I wanted.
Even better, as Discovery Education recently featured, students can also use buncee to enrich their writing, share their learning, express their creativity, and connect with peers. With buncee, you can have multimedia fun at the front and back ends of an assignment.
So how have you used buncee to create writing prompts in your classroom? I’d love to hear! In the meantime, happy writing, happy teaching, happy creating.
Meghan Lin is a writer and arts integration advocate with 13 years in the classroom. She’d love to help you doctor your lesson plans with all things creative at her website.
The post Guest Blog: Meghan Lin Talks Writing Prompts appeared first on buncee blog.