Learning, learning, and more learning. Writing and learning. Writing across the curriculum. As a teacher, you know how learning and writing are connected. And trying to come up with new ideas so that you have a variety of interesting ways to engage your students so that they will write to reinforce their learning - and to show you what they've learned, is a challenge. This article includes 10 prompts that might be new to you (and each includes a definition, if needed, and one or more sample expansions of the prompt):

1. aphorism (a concise, pithy statement of a principle; usually instructional)

• Write one or more brief aphorisms containing some important truths learned so far this year.
• Write our lab safety rules as aphorisms.
• Find some Spanish aphorisms and then determine if there are any equivalent ones in English (or vice versa).
• Write an aphorism for writing your first computer program.

2. apologue (a short moral story, which may have animal characters; allegory)

• Write an apologue for someone who is reading The Origin of Species for the first time.
• Write an apologue describing how color mixing came to be. For instance, 2 little skunks were sneaking up at a picnic. The red, yellow and blue foods spattered all directions, combining to form secondary colors, etc.
• Compare and contrast an allegory to an apologue.

3. apology

• Write an apology to God for messing up the environment.
• Design a greeting card to say you're sorry.
• Choose an 'attitude,' e.g., serious, humorous, sarcastic, or any of a number of other attitudes. Write an apology portraying your understanding of this attitude.
• Write an apology from Juliet & Romeo to their parents explaining their actions.
• Write an apology from Higgins to Eliza about how he treats her as a thing.