Writing Captions

Need some creative writing ideas to help your students.  Writing captions is harder than you think.  They  have to be short and express creativity. Scholastic News has a section in their website that allows students to write and submit a caption for a picture each week.  Below is the picture for this week.

I was thinking this would be a great weekly activity for the classroom. Print the picture and have your students come up with the caption. They could work in groups or individually.   Have them vote on the best two and you submit those.  That way everyone is sharing ideas and trying to come up with the best.  The next week you can see which captions were chosen.  

All students can submit a caption they came up with, but I think the sharing and explaining would help some of us "less creative" individuals. I also am thinking of some of my past students who would just submit anything so they could say they did and would have benefited by the sharing, etc.

One year I printed pictures submitted to a photography contest for the Kansas City Star and my eighth graders wrote a story to go with the picture.  They were awesome.  Some of the students I thought would just slop down anything really got into it and I was amazed with the thought and effort they shared.  

What do you think?