How did that shoe end up on the side of a highway?
What does that graffiti mean, and who put it there?
The answers to these simple questions, stimulated by a photograph, can make your classroom buzz with ideas, enabling students to spend time on the craft of writing instead of waiting for inspiration to strike.
Award-winning playwright and theatre educator Maureen Brady Johnson offers a jumpstart to teachers who want to take a first step toward teaching playwriting-or any form of creative writing-by offering audio and visual cues that stimulate creativity. These photographs, songs, lyrics, sounds, and overheard conversations help writers see the extraordinary in the ordinary and take risks in their writing as they compose short plays.
Go ahead, try something new. Watch your students cultivate storylines, create conflicts, and develop characters; see them invested in and engaged by the entire process from their first draft to a final, polished play. And marvel as they strengthen their writing skills in ways that more traditional writing assignments can't. Read Shoes on the Highway and witness the power of playwriting at work in your classroom.
Visit http: //www.heinemann.com/shoesonthehighway to download free photo files to use as writing prompts in your classroom.
About the Author: Maureen Brady Johnson is a writer, a theatre and playwriting teacher, and a photographer. Her play "Rock Paper Scissors" was a finalist in the Actor's Theatre Louisville's Ten Minute Play Contest. She has written two books on middle school drama, and her articles on theatre have appear in EDTA's Teaching Theatre, Talking Points, the Ohio Journal of English and Language Arts, and the Rock and Roll Museum and Hall of Fame newsletter "IMPACT."
