Speed Limit Technology?

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has put out a statement titled, “NTSB Calls for Technology to Reduce Speeding in All New Cars.” In this statement, they share that they want all new cars to come with technology that can prevent speeding. What do you think of this idea? Should cars come with technology that can tell what the speed limit is and works automatically to stop speeding from happening? How do you think this would work? Would it be problematic? Would it help? Would you want this to happen?

Share and explain your thinking, making sure to use relevant details and examples to support what you have to say.

Argumentative/persuasive option: make the case for or against all cars coming with speed limit enforcing technology .

🦄✏️ Check out unicornwriting.com for more creative writing prompts and education resources including the FREE Writing Prompts Starter Pack. Or follow along with unicornwriting on Instagram. 🦄✏️

$5 Million Survivor Challenge

A popular YouTube channel is offering to pay you five million dollars if you move to a remote island for five years. There will be no communication with the outside world, and you will live a simple life, relying on nature for food and shelter. You will have an emergency button that will get you a helicopter rescue within an hour, but you would lose all the money if you have to use it. Would you accept the offer?

Share and explain your thinking, making sure to use relevant details and examples to support what you have to say.

Narrative option: tell a story (true or fictional) involving someone who decides to try this.

Argumentative/persuasive option: make the case for whether or not this would be a good decision for someone to make.

This writing prompt is from unicornwriting.com 

Applicable Common Core Writing Standards: CCRA.W.1, CCRA.W.2, CCRA.W.3, CCRA.W.4, CCRA.W.5, CCRA.W.6, CCRA.W.10

🦄✏️ Check out unicornwriting.com for more creative writing prompts and education resources including the FREE Writing Prompts Starter Pack. Or follow along with unicornwriting on Instagram. 🦄✏️

Self-Confidence Scale

[A scale from 0 to 5 with 0 labeled “No self-confidence at all. Easily embarrassed, fears failure, lack of healthy boundaries, lots of self-doubt and negative thinking” and 5 labeled “Too overly self-confident, full of themselves, arrogant, entitled, feeling like they deserve special treatment or attention.”]

Where do you think you are on the self-confidence scale? Where do you imagine others perceive you on this scale? Where do you think most people are? Where do you think the ideal spot on the scale is? Where do you want to be? How do you think you can get there? If someone else was trying to have better, healthier self confidence, what advice would you share with them? Could you give that same advice to yourself? What does the scale over simplify or not account for? Share your thoughts on the self-confidence scale.

This writing prompt is from unicornwriting.com 

Applicable Common Core Writing Standards: CCRA.W.1, CCRA.W.2, CCRA.W.3, CCRA.W.4, CCRA.W.5, CCRA.W.6, CCRA.W.10 

🦄✏️ Check out unicornwriting.com for more creative writing prompts and education resources including the FREE Writing Prompts Starter Pack. Or follow along with unicornwriting on Instagram. 🦄✏️

This is one of the writing prompts from a new of 30+ prompts that I made for the start of the school year. If you’re interested, the set is available on my TPT store.

Here’s what I shared over there about this set:
This resource includes five different versions of a set of more than 30 creative and engaging writing prompts for the start of the school year. These are the writing prompts that I chose to do at the start of the school year to get to know my class and to help them get to know each other. They served us well in helping build classroom community through students sharing their writing with each other. They have been carefully crafted to be creative, engaging, interesting, and not-stereotypical. These writing prompts are perfect for student writing journals, warmup activities, bellringers, or classroom writing practice.

The prompts or writing ideas are aligned to Common Core Writing Anchor Standards 1,2, and 3.

This digital product comes in five versions!

The prompts are shared in five different formats, so that you can access and share them with students in multiple ways:

Google Slides
PowerPoint
PDF of Slides
Printable workbook
Text ony

Liking Stuff

“big secret to happiness is just liking stuff. finding more stuff to like. finding ways to like stuff you didn’t before.” 

— Lauren Wilford 

What do you think? What’s the idea this quote is sharing and what do you think of it? Do you think there’s truth in it? Is liking stuff a big secret to happiness? What’s some stuff you like? What’s some stuff that you think you might be able to like? What’s some stuff that you would recommend to others to try liking. 

🦄✏️ Check out unicornwriting.com for more creative writing prompts and education resources including the FREE Writing Prompts Starter Pack. Or follow along with unicornwriting on Instagram. 🦄✏️

Achieving Perfection 

The popular farming game Stardew Valley, has a “perfection tracker” that can be unlocked that allows the player to see their progress on all the significant achievements in the game. 

If real life had a perfection tracker, what do you think should be on it? How far along do you think you would you be at achieving perfection? How far do you think you could get in your lifetime? What about most people? Would you want real life to have a perfection tracker? How would you feel about it if it did? Share your thoughts on a real life perfection tracker. 

🦄✏️ Check out unicornwriting.com for more creative writing prompts and education resources including the FREE Writing Prompts Starter Pack. Or follow along with unicornwriting on Instagram. 🦄✏️

Forever in the Cloud

A well-known, global tech corporation launches a service that enables you to upload your consciousness to a digital cloud, allowing you to exist forever inside a virtual world where you can live out your ideal life, experiencing whatever life you want to live and enjoy. However, there’s a big catch: this process is irreversible. You can’t go back. Once you’ve been uploaded to the virtual reality cloud, you are there forever. Would you be willing to upload yourself to this digital afterlife? How do you think most other people would respond to this scenario? 

Share your thinking and make sure to use details and examples to support what you have to say. 

[N.B. — yes, this writing prompt is similar to the premise of the show Upload]

🦄✏️ Check out unicornwriting.com for more prompts and resources including the FREE Writing Prompts Starter Pack. Or follow along with unicornwriting on Instagram. 🦄✏️

What You Can Reach

“Time flies, and one day I think you will regret if you don’t reach what you can reach. You should demand more from you. This is not me demanding more from you. You should demand more from you.” 

— Jose Mourinho 

Jose Mourinho is a soccer coach (or football in most of the world), and he gave this advice to a player who was very talented but didn’t seem to be focused on working hard to maximize that talent. If this advice was given to you, what would you think of it? Would it make you want to reach what you can reach? What do you imagine you can reach? What do you imagine you would you regret later in life if you didn’t demand more from yourself now? How do you typically respond to demands from others? Does this advice feel any different because it suggests self-motivation rather than an external demand? What specific steps would you consider taking to begin demanding more from yourself, in line with Mourinho’s advice?

🦄✏️ Check out unicornwriting.com for more prompts and resources including the FREE Writing Prompts Starter Pack. Or follow along with unicornwriting on Instagram. 🦄✏️

Your Own Herald

If you got to have a herald follow you around and announce you — or a message of your choosing — to everyone whenever you went anywhere, what would you want them to announce? Around 1000 years ago, it was the job of heralds to announce the names and titles of knights and royalty or to announce important messages or royal proclamations. If you got to have one now, what would you have them say? How would that go? Would you make up important titles for yourself or have them announce your accomplishments to the world or share some message that you really think everyone should hear? 

Share your thinking and make sure to use details and examples to support what you have to say. 

🦄✏️ Check out unicornwriting.com for more prompts and resources including the FREE Writing Prompts Starter Pack. Or follow along with unicornwriting on Instagram. 🦄✏️

A Place to Think 

What would be the perfect place for you to be able to do some deep thinking? If you got to design your very own space for you to go to think deeply about something important, what would that place be like? 

All our brains are different and have different needs and wiring, so what might work for one person might not work at all for someone else. Some people need things like music and colors and clutter and movement to think, and some people need things like stillness and darkness and calm and quiet. Maybe for some people it’s a room with whiteboards for walls and a trampoline for a floor, or for some it might be an empty library filled with old books. Maybe it’s a lawn chair in a zen garden or a hammock in the sun next to a burbling stream or a pile of blankets in a cozy cave with a roaring fire.

What about for you? If you got the chance to design an ideal thinking space for yourself, what would you want it to be like?  Share your thoughts on what comes to mind for you when designing your ideal thinking space.

🦄✏️ Check out unicornwriting.com for more prompts and resources including the FREE Writing Prompts Starter Pack. Or follow along with unicornwriting on Instagram. 🦄✏️

Villain Investment Pitches 

Imagine that there is a tv show for aspiring super villains where they get to go in front a panel of judges (maybe a panel of some of the most notorious criminal masterminds?) and pitch their evil inventions and villainous schemes. The judges hear the ideas and then decide which evil plan or invention they will fund. 

You can either tell a story about this scenario or pitch an evil invention or plan from the perspective of one of these aspiring villains. 

🦄✏️ Check out unicornwriting.com for more prompts and resources including the FREE Writing Prompts Starter Pack. Or follow along with unicornwriting on Instagram. 🦄✏️

light switch parallel worlds

According to Nathan W. Pyle, if you find a light switch that doesn’t control anything, then it “likely switches you between two nearly identical parallel worlds.” 

Tell the story of someone who flips a light switch that doesn’t seem to do anything … that is, until things start to seem just ever so slightly different …

🦄✏️ Check out unicornwriting.com for more prompts and resources including the FREE Writing Prompts Starter Pack. Or follow along with unicornwriting on Instagram. 🦄✏️

Can you describe yourself the way that an author would describe you if you were a character in a novel?

Share your thinking and make sure to use details and examples to support what you have to say. 

🦄✏️ Check out unicornwriting.com for more prompts and resources including the FREE Writing Prompts Starter Pack. Or follow along with unicornwriting on Instagram. 🦄✏️

Young and Unhappy

USA Today shared an article about how the World Happiness Report shows a significant decline in happiness of young Americans. The article speculates about the causes but notes that “researchers agree that there’s no one cause for the decline, rather a cluster of factors that’s driving young people to dissatisfaction….” What do you think of this? Does this decline in happiness make sense to you? Why do you think young people in the U.S. are reporting lower levels of happiness compared to previous generations and compared to young people in some other parts of the world? Do you have ideas for what could be done about this? 

Share your thinking and make sure to use details and examples to support what you have to say. 

Article: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/03/21/world-happiness-report-young-people-u-s/73051010007/ 

The Perfect Care Package
If someone sent you a care package that you got to open right now, what would you want it to have in it? What five things would you want to have in it? Why those things? Share your thoughts on what you would want included in the care package and why you would want those things.

🦄✏️ Check out unicornwriting.com for more prompts and resources including the FREE Writing Prompts Starter Pack. Or follow along with unicornwriting on Instagram. 🦄✏️