Good morning! This will be our last newsletter of the year, but we’re leaving you with plenty of ideas for teaching and learning. Have a wonderful, well-deserved holiday break and we’ll see you again in 2026! — The Learning NetworkThe 10 Most Commented-On Writing Prompts of 2025
These are the writing prompts that garnered the most student responses on our site this year. What do you notice? What do you wonder? Taken together, what do you think the popularity of these prompts says about teenagers today? 1. Should Grades Be Based on Excellence or Effort? Recent Times reporting about education
More teaching resources from The Learning Network
Student Activity: Writing obituaries to reflect on life lessons
Joel Snyder, a social studies teacher in Los Angeles, wondered how studying the lives of others might teach his students about what it means to contribute meaningfully to society, so he designed a project around Times obituaries. In this lesson plan, he takes you step-by-step through how his students researched and wrote obituaries of family or community members. Along the way, he writes, they continually connected the past to the present, and reflected on the lessons their subjects could teach them about resilience, humility, hard work, and commitment to community. Before you go, see what teens are saying in response to Picture Prompts.
As 2025 draws to a close, we asked teenagers to reflect on the end of the year via three Picture Prompts, one about gratitude, another about the onset of winter and a third on Oxford’s Word of the Year. Here is a favorite from each. On “seasonal sadness”: The image by Audrey Helen Weber reflects my shifting in moods along with the seasons. I feel that the darkness of winter shadows my spark — my personality — like an eclipse. In summer I can wake up to the sun and the sound of birds chirping and feel motivated through their songs. However, in winter I wake up and feel like a cloud has covered the entire sky, leaving a feeling of endless gloom in its trail. Through this time we must find a new motivator to kindle our spark. Create your own light. — Pfannenstiel, Chicago On gratitude: I am grateful for many things; my family, friends, peers, teachers, extracurriculars, and the life I have. However, if I were to shorten my list and make it oddly specific, it would consist of: — Sleeping more than two hours — a rare occurrence as of late. To end my list, I would conclude with the most important thing — pesto sauce. — Madelyn, North Carolina On the Word of the Year: Designating “rage bait” as the word of the year is signal fire in a universe of darkness. It is a call for society to confront the toxic online culture of emotional exploitation that feeds conflict instead of fostering connection. — Jocelyn, CA We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to LNfeedback@nytimes.com. More next week.
|
