For the past few years, educators from across the country have been coming together to write. What we have learned so far is that having a regular place to come to for ideas and audience is perhaps the most important aspect of nurturing a writing life (and, of course, to actually write something).
Writers seem to know where to go for inspiration — nature, art, photographs, books, poetry, authors, memory. But when a writer is faced with an empty page or a flashing cursor, a writer’s mind can go blank and, along with it, any sense of hope that the words will come.
Indeed, sometimes what a writer needs the most is another writer — for their inspiration, for their process, for their mentor text. And so, Ethical ELA offers teachers and socially-distanced students a collection of writers to keep writing lives loved during this time away from our classrooms.
The 141+ ways offered here are merely suggestions — not rules. In a writer’s world, a suggestion is an invitation to play with the idea, stretch into new ways of seeing the word and the world (Freire), express dormant emotions or silenced perspectives, and even disrupt standardized words, syntax, and form by inventing new words, fracturing expectations, and inventing forms. Sometimes rejecting a suggestion is just that sense of power a writer needs to tackle the waiting cursor.
You are welcome to write in this space, but you may wish to create your own — a technological oldie like a notebook will do just fine, but a Google classroom discussion or Google Site, Flipgrid read aloud, Kidblog, or even Instagram hashtag will work to offer the place and audience you and your students need to keep the writing love alive.
141+ Ways
- Haiku
- Origin Stories
- Giving Voice
- Synethesia & Color
- Aural Textures
- Epistolary
- 20 Questions
- What have you lost?
- Apology Poem
- What I want is…
- Dramatic Monologue
- Wonder Women
- Hot Lines
- Abuelito Who
- Call of Words
- Skinny Poem
- Bop Poem
- Echo Sonnet
- Fibonacci Poem
- Golden Shovel
- Nonet
- Quatrain
- Ritual
- Struggling Couplets
- Artwork
- Story of One Syllables
- Writing Down the Bones (Goldberg)
- Imaginative Play
- Senior Year
- Rule of Thirds
- Salute to Latinx Authors
- Spine Poem
- Día de los Muertos
- Inspired by an Artist
- Honor a Leader
- Ode
- Blackjack Poem
- Lists
- A Three-Element Poem
- Childhood, Where I’m From
- Travel Tanka
- #HashtagPoems
- I Remember
- Storytime
- Mashed Potato Bar Poems
- Artifact
- Old Clothes
- Photograph
- Two Sides of a Coin
- An Imaginary Mrs.
- Summer Tanka…And 30 more from #verselove19, a celebration of poetry for National Poetry Month:
- Patched Poems
- Finding Your Voice
- Family
- Celestial Bodies
- Lyrics of Your Life
- Memories
- News in Verse
- Historical Figures
- Spine Poetry
- Choices
- Music
- Timeless and Timely
- Lazy Sonnet, Fourteen Words
- Transliteration
- Pantoum
- Patterning Poetry
- Games & Sports
- Break-Up Poem
- Things We Carry
- A Space of Meaning
- Emotional Memory
- In My Closet, On the Top Shelf (Alexander)
- Reacting, Responding to Image
- #booklove
- Intertextuality
- Place-Based Poem
- Advice to…
- Sarah Kaye says, “Make a list.”
- My Best Part
- What is good?
- April 1, Credo
- April 2, Blitz
- April 3, Etheree
- April 4, Hairs
- April 5, Lyrics
- April 6, Object
- April 7, Ekphrastic
- April 8, Monologue
- April 9, Glimmers
- April 10, Golden Shovel
- April 11, Real Life Ballads
- April 12, Where I’m From
- April 13, Dreams
- April 14, Mirror and Juxtaposing
- April 15, Analogy Acrostics
- April 16, Having a Coke With You
- April 17, Lines for the Fortune Cookie
- April 18, Both Sides, Now
- April 19, Snap-Shot
- April 20, Setting in Ten Lines
- April 21, Earth and Ovillejo
- April 22, At Fifteen
- April 23, Observations
- April 24, Significant Numbers
- April 25, List of Firsts
- April 26, Reasons Why and Responses To
- April 27, Brother
- April 28, The Morning After
- April 29, A Day in a List
- April 30, What Remains to Be Said
- May, I Remember,
- Duplex,
- The Way I Felt,
- Turn From,
- Right Words at the Right Time
- June, Lists,
- Small Fictions,
- Memory Poem,
- Marcher or Leaper,
- Writing with Melanie Crowder
- July, Rondeau,
- Ode,
- Ghazal,
- Monotetra,
- Praise Poem
- August, Indelible Moments,
- A Container,
- Your Weather,
- The “Re” in Relationships,
- Moment of Change
- September, Decisions,
- Ego and Homage,
- News and New,
- Magic-9,
- Tasting a Memory
- October, Ways of Looking,
- Tritina,
- Take a Word for a Walk,
- Allusion,
- Bodies in Motion