Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Wouldn't these make great writing prompt pictures?

Check out this blog post: Seamless Pictures. Shades of Escher, but in color and... well, you just have to see.

I've used pictures from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by the amazing illustrator Christopher van Allsburg (of Jumanji and Polar Express fame) with kids as picture writing prompts. In a summer writing session, we challenged kids to come up with captions for the pictures. Young kids, literal as ever, gave them some very straighforward captions such as, "A nun is sitting an a floating chair." After we read the text that goes with the pictures, a few of them started to get the idea that the caption and the picture together can tell a story.

I can see Seamless Pictures being used in the same way, either to come up with interesting captions (which are in themselves one-line stories), or as prompts to create surreal stories. Give them a try and see what you come up with.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Another great place for writing picture prompts is the free Morgue File at http://www.morguefile.com

Thanks for the link to my writing prompts blog! You may (or may not) be interested in my main writing blog, Susan Writes.