Use prompts

Many students and teachers are familiar with writing prompts, questions or sentence-starters to help students get thinking and writing. Not just for students, prompts can help you process your world, identify your goals, improve your conversations, strengthen your relationships, and much more.

Here are some ways you might use prompts:

• Need something to talk about at dinnertime or on road trips? These make conversations much more interesting, help you pass the time, and encourage you to learn more about your companions. Find some examples here and here.

• Stuck on ways to connect with kids? I bought this mother-son journal and this mother-daughter journal and have learned a lot about how they interpret the world in their responses. Sometimes writing to each other can be easier than talking out loud to each other.

• Speaking of writing, prompts can be a great way to help you if you want to journal, or perhaps if you are using morning pages, which I've been doing since I suggested it last month. I found this list of 650 prompts for narrative and personal writing. Here's a list for kids with links to others.

• Prompts can also help you set goals. Here are 12 to get you started.

• Select some go-to prompts for better conversations. I posted last year about asking better questions. A friend of mine is great at this and always asks "What was the best part?" to focus the conversation and get to the highlight.

Questions can challenge us, teach us, change us. Use prompts.

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