Eureka!

I have so many situations when I sit down to write a speech but I don't have any idea how to start, what examples to bring and how to make it creative and interesting to listen.

Fortunately, there are some methods to overcome the crisis. In this post I will try them starting with the warm-up.

Warm-ups

• One letter

The main idea of this warm-up is to choose a letter and then name at least 10 words staring with this letter.

I take the letter "l" and the words are: life, line, landscape, league, leapfrog, lemon, level, look, love, lost .

• Random words

At the website https://www.textfixer.com/tools/random-words.php I need to generate 5 words to write a paragraph using them.

Yesterday I got a strange, mystical letter from an anonym. This anonym made me an appointment on  my balcony to tell me the shocking truth. So today after turning back from my work, I'm a diplomatic agent by the way, I hope to find out who this anonym is or who makes this kind of jokes.

Creative writing prompts

1. What if...

I have an imaginary problems and my task is to find 7 ways out.

The situation is: What if there were no desks in the classrooms, but only beanbags?

Solution №1. Children would write lying on the floor and listen and work sitting on these beanbags.

Solution №2. I would use more communicative tasks at the lesson and the writing tasks would be for homework only.

Solution №3. I would ask children to write on the board one by one if neccessary.

Solution №4. I would buy some little board for my children to write on them.

Solution №5. Also I would ask student to use their mobile phones and laptops.

Solution №6. I would do more physical activities with children as it's not healthy, I suppose, to sit on these beanbags for 45 minutes.

Solution №7. There would be time for sleeping at a school with beanbags instead of desks.

2. Six thinking hats

If you don't know how to create a good speech and where to get the facts and arguments, six thinking hats may help you. Now lets try this method with the topic "How many foreign languages should be taught to students at school?"

My topic sentence is "A student should be taught as many foreign languages as he or she wants to learn"

The method suggests to think in six directions:

1. White thinking hat covers facts, figures, information needs, and gaps.
Psycologically children are able to learn and distinguish lots of languages. The most important thing here is to make them interested in learning languages.

2. Red thinking hat covers intuition, feelings and emotions.
We should let children explore anything they want.

3. Black thinking hat is the hat of judgement and logic.
Sometimes children don't want to learn any languages at all.

4. Yellow thinking hat is the hat of optimism.
For example, there is the Kolesovs who have five children. All of them know at least 2 langauges. The elder child Matvey is a World chess champion and he knows 5 languages. That's all thanks to the parents who managed to make their children interested in study.

5. Green thinking hat is the hat of creativity, alternatives, proposals, provocations and changes.
If I could change anything in the education, I would change the schools to make them similar to the Summerhill school of free education where children study only those subjects they want. In this way my topic sentence would be easy to become real.

6. Blue thinking hat is the hat of overview and analysis.
If I add some more details to each point, I think that everything will be alright. There  are quite a lot facts and examples from life. But I'm still not sure about the red hat.

So these are the exercises we were suggested to do. I find them very useful as they really help to get lots of new ideas!