Writing prompts

In my writing classes, I find that I'm always inventing writing prompts--just stuff that comes to me on the fly, in the shower, before falling asleep--I jot them down and often spring them on my students without giving much thought to how (or whether) they might work. What's important is to get them writing (or so I tell myself).

These prompts fall into two categories: (1) the shorter, fill-in-the-blank "starter" bits (which I call prompts) designed to generate a quick list or descriptive passage, from which point the writer will then (hopefully) go deeper, and (2) the more detailed, (usually) more thought-out (or tested) assignments, which I expect the students to complete over the course of a week and which (ideally) involve several stages.

Here are a few of this semester's prompts, and two of my assignments. Anyone want to share some of yours?

prompts:
1) "I Never Knew"
2) "I get my _____ from _____"
3) "My parents looked _____"
4) "If I were you, "
5) Rita Dove's "Ten-Minute Spill" [see The Practice of Poetry]
6) A- generate random list of nouns; B- plug them into this rubric: "The ____ says . . ." ("The tree says..."; "The snail says . . ."; "The air-traffic controller says . . ."; "The shoulder says . . .")

assignments:
1) Write a poem in which something lacking the capacity for language is nevertheless "speaking" to you.
2) Borrow a line from another text--NOT a poem--and use it as the opening line in your poem.