Category: Teacher’s resource

Here are some more photos I have found that I felt would be useful for language or writing teachers.   If you look at the following images, each and everyone of them should spark off ideas in the fantasy of your students be they kids or adults.

I try and find images that I feel are sufficiently strange or thought provoking so that they are guaranteed to make anyone looking at them stop, think and make up a story about how the situation captured in the photos came about.

For instance, look at this one and stop and consider what it is you are looking at.   Why is he there, getting something out of the wall, putting something into the wall…?  What is the backstory behind his being there in that strange and empty place?   What country?  When? and so on. 

As you can see, an image such as this can lead to endless questions, and thus, if handled correctly, can generate an almost endless stream of ideas.

Or what to think of this one?

What on earth is that guy doing?   It seems to me that there are almost endless possibilities in this image.  Why has he apparently dug a small hole in an apparently perfectly good road surface?  I can imagine that it should be possible to write a short story based on this image, one that probably gives away the reason for the man poking his head into that small hole in the very last sentence of the story?

Continue reading “More Odd Images For Teachers”

Once again I have made a small collection of images that I think could be useful as idea generators, pictures that kids could easily use to set their fantasy off in order to write entertaining and quirky stories.  And of course, not only kids, all sorts and ages of us could use one or more of these images to be the start point of a story.

This is a photo of what Brisbane used to look like, which is not really important.  The reason I chose this image is that it shows a town that was very much a frontier town, farm animals wandering around the street, a mud street you may note…  So it seemed to me that there must be dozens of stories lurking in this straight-forward looking photo…

Go for it, and let me know what you (or your students) make of it please.

This is plain weird….  Apparently it is a photo of a gang of KKK idiots on a group outing….  What fun they all seem to be having – or at least if they were honest (and brave enough) to show their faces it might be possible to see how they are all laughing and having a great time on that Ferris Wheel…  Anyhow, politics and decency to one side for a minute, this is an epically odd image seems to me, and once again, surely any of you could find a story in it?

Apparently this is a photo of an abandoned Lunatic Asylum, has to be a story there I feel….

Continue reading “Curious And Odd Images”

Continuing my search for images that might be useful to give kids the needed nudge to start to write creatively, here is a collection of extremely odd images of even odder people doing odd things.

To be honest, most of these images seem to me to be completely impossible to find any sort of rational explanation for, but that is precisely why I have chosen them, as in order to explain them one needs to let fantasy rip, and venture out into the uncharted regions of one’s imagination.

You see what I mean?  Try and find an explanation for this one that is not totally insane.

OK, even Yetis need to get to work I suppose……..

Don’t even ask what she is doing!!!!

This must be part of some sort of Balkan or Scandinavian folk dance?

Um, yes…………………….

No idea!  But I find the creature on the left deeply worrying….  And why on earth would she want to sit on a small alligator I wonder.

Continue reading “Strange Images For Creative Writing”

Here are some more images that I thought might be helpful to you teachers to get your student’s minds moving.    Show them one or more of these and suggest they use them as a starting point for a story.     In fact these images can be used by anyone for a similar purpose.

And for the rest of us, well, they are simply curious, and thought provoking.  At least I find them so.   All of them were taken in the 19th Century, some as early as 1820, and none later than 1890, so all the people in them are now long dead and buried.   This is an aspect of such old photos that never fails to move me.   One gazes at the features of these people, and wonders about their lives, their hopes and dreams, and were their lives good ones or sad ones.. did they live to a ripe old age, or did they die the day after the photo was taken?

So many questions are asked by these images  – endless material for thinking and creating.

So here you go…  A load of images, with no explanations about any of them,as I prefer to leave that up to your imagination.

Continue reading “More Curious Photos To Play With”

Here are another load of odd and intriguing (and mostly inexplicable) images that might be used to spark off a creative writing class in a school, or simply to give your imagination a challenge – What on earth are they all about????

I shan’t attempt to put any sort of title or comment by these images, but simply bung them here and leave it up to you to make of them what you can….  So let your mind go free and see what you can make using these images.

Continue reading “Odd And Curious Images”