Teachers Nature Writing Prompts

‘Sweetness and softness were old friends seldom heard from.’

Write a poem that opens with this line.

Write a poem about decay.

Normally associated with death and disease, decay is also vital in nature for the next generation of life. What perspective will you take?

Walking to work one day, staring off into the clouds, the sky starts to fracture in front of your eyes...

Write a poem based on this scene.

Use the symbol of fruits in your poem to represent a theme.

Many fruits are symbolic with different meanings behind them, like the pomegranate symbolizing fertility, or the apple representing temptation.

Write a story where your character is taking a blindfolded taste test.

You can centre your narrative around something light-hearted, like a sleepover, or something intense like a culinary competition.

Write a poem in the pentameter form.

The pentameter form is where each line contains 10 syllables. This gives the poem a unique and recognizable rhythm often found in sonnets.

Write a short story or poem about a couple’s anniversary that uses weather as a motif.

Motifs can affect a reader’s view of characters and story greatly. You could use adjectives typically used for weather to create the characters, or metaphors of weather to describe relationships and scenarios.

Write a story or poem involving the passage of time.

This could manifest as narrative time jumps, through aging characters, or even as a change in the environment.

‘The flood flowed cold with inky blood

and yet the wet sky blinked with stars in deep slumber’

Write a poem with internal rhymes, ending with this line. Internal rhyme, in this case, is where words within the same line rhyme with each other.

Compose a poem that starts with an idiom.

Idioms are common, sometimes metaphorical sayings such as ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’, and ‘love at first sight’. Which idiom will you use to set the theme for your poem?

Describe a beautiful summer's evening.

You could incorporate this into a story, but the focus should be on describing the atmosphere of the evening, and why it would be enjoyable.

Write a sonnet about something you learned recently.

Don’t worry about nailing iambic pentameter here – instead, try to meet the Shakespearean rhyme scheme ABABCDCDEFEFGG.