Free Brainstorming Activities

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Laura from youngwritersworkshops.com, and I'm going to talk about free brainstorming activities. This can be a great way to get some ideas going, perhaps at the beginning of the year with your writer's workshop. You want to spend some time just throwing out there some ideas. A lot of writing teachers use The Writer's Notebook as a storage place for ideas. So, this could be a way to get a good list going. You might gather everyone together. Have them work with a partner, and during a time period have them write as many ideas of things that they might want to write about as they possible can. Maybe give them a prompt like, "list all of your favorite things", or, "all of the things that you've ever read about in a book", or, just give them a little bit of a structure but let them get going and have the specific instruction of not stopping, you know, not putting your pencil down. This might be, and then they can read their lists to each other, and they might borrow some from each other's lists as well. This can also be the first step in an assignment where you have them take one of them and brainstorm more about one specific topic on that list. So, a good way again to use free association brain storming, or free brainstorming, is just for the kids to start writing and don't stop for a certain amount of time writing period, and then you'll have a big list of topics to work from. So those are some ideas about free brainstorming activities."