Listing, the "Basics of Life," and Completing Sentences

Present listing the way you presented clustering and freewriting. After reading the description, provide students a general subject that you have been studying and give them time to list possible topics to write about. Have them each select a topic of interest from their lists and share the idea with the class. Then take a poll by show of hands:

• Which of you found clustering to be the most helpful strategy for finding a topic?
• Which of you found freewriting to be the most helpful strategy?
• Which of you found listing to be most helpful?

Encourage students to use their most helpful strategy next time they need to find a topic, but also to keep the other two approaches in mind.

Then present the Basics of Life Checklist. This strategy starts with general subject areas that students need to connect to an assignment that you give. For example, if you assign students to write about "a needed change in the community," a student could select the subject "education" from the Basics of Life Checklist and create this topic: "Parents need to be more involved in the classroom." After students understand this strategy, have them connect a subject from the checklist to an assignment you give, such as the following:

• A favorite place to be
• A career I would want
• A huge annoyance

Have each student share one of the topics that he or she discovered.

Finally, present completing sentences. After explaining the strategy, have students complete each of the six sentences provided. (You can find more sentence starters on page 45.) Ask students to share interesting topic ideas they came up with.

Search Sources of Information and Draw a Life Map

In a formal setting, search sources of information is about research and information literacy—both critical academic skills. In an informal setting, though, this advice is actually just about curiosity: wanting to know. Students who foster a sense of wonder about life and seek to understand the world around them will devour sources of information simply as a matter of course.

The second strategy, draw a life map, can help students reflect over their lives, creating a visual narrative of where they have been (and where they may be going). This strategy is especially helpful for discovering topics for personal, reflective, and narrative writing. After presenting this strategy and walking students through the sample, have them create their own life maps. Then have each student share one interesting topic idea from their maps.

Writing Prompts

Encourage students to turn to this page for dozens of starting point for writing. Every student in your class could write to the same prompt, but every response would be unique to the individual. Also, one student could respond to the same prompt multiple times, with different outcomes each time.

Have students select one promising prompt on this page and write a paragraph response, "trying it on for size."

Researching and Talking to Others

This page provides an overview of skills that students need for information and media literacy, listening and speaking, and research. The cross-references under many of these skills lead two whole chapters on the topics. Present this information to students, letting them know they will be using all of these processes to gather details for their formal writing assignments in your class.

Using a Gathering Grid

A gathering grid is a graphic organizer that helps track questions, answers, and sources for research projects. In fact, students who use gathering grids might want to build them in a spreadsheet program, allowing them to be infinitely expanded and recombined.

Lead students through the description of the gathering grid, and discuss with them the example. Then ask them to select one of the topics they have discovered so far this chapter and create a Gathering Grid based upon it.

Organizing the Details

After finding a focus, students are ready to organize the details for their writing. Their old friend, the cluster, shows up as one strategy that works well for classification writing. Remind them of the many other graphic organizers they learned about on page 48. They can pair these up with the organizational patterns listed at the bottom of page 51.

Ask students to take the topic for which they found a focus (on page 50) and use a graphic organizer to arrange supporting details for the focus.