Say that you’ve plumb run out of ideas. There ain’t nuthin’ there. The well is dry, the riverbed is … well, you get the idea. So what do you do? You take a break. What you need to do is get down to the basics, like:

School: Using a trick from those days of yore, back when you had to do book reports, here’s a collection of links to lists of book report ideas, including book reports for the bored and 20 ideas for book projects.

www.webenglishteacher.com/bookreports.html

Or maybe the problem is you need to refresh yourself on the basics … of nature. And not necessarily the human kind. Check out the animal kind, the endangered kind, like your ideas: At this website, fifth graders were told to learn as much as they could about an endangered animal and write a story about what they had learned … just like us!

www2.lhric.org/pocantico/5thgrade99/animals.htm

Then there are those classic children’s stories. These themes stay with us through the years:

http://childhoodreading.com/

And then there’s the place beyond the here and how, the netherwhere. At this website, we can get ideas from the ghost stories and odd folktales from one of the scariest places around, the American South. Light a lantern, open the gate, and come take a walk down the moonlit road:

http://www.themoonlitroad.com/

And after all this, that basket of ideas might have something rattling in it after all!

Copyright 2005 Eilis Flynn