There are many blogs and resources that these ideas are ‘magpied’ from, I have adapted a number over the years to try and improve the use of descriptive language of the children I have taught, a massive inspiration has been the work of Alan Peat. I have been fortunate enough to attend bespoke training with Alan on two separate occasions and he is an incredibly knowledgable, passionate and inspirational man. I have learned a lot from using his ‘Exciting Sentences’ materials and they have been, by far, the most effective tool in improving the quality of children’s writing.
More recently I have been using and adapting the work of MrD:HT (Twitter: @KarlDuke8) to help develop the use of prepositional language and phrases with my children to add a sense of depth and richness to their descriptive writing.
Starting with a picture prompt like the one below the children collect ideas using their 5 senses, imagining that they were experiencing the scene first hand. This immediately provides the opportunity to move away from the dreaded “I can see xxxxx and I can see zzzz. ” which has been a predominant feature of the children’s descriptive writing up until this point.
Step 1
This would start as an oracy paired task with a children in turn offering things that fit into each sense – this promotes a wider opportunity for the more word poor children to generate things to write about as we willfuly allow children to ‘adopt’ ideas from each other and use them in their own writing.
Next children would quickly collect ideas by jotting down words or short phrases in a table:
For the ‘feel’ row I often allow children to write emotion words as they can be used to further develop the overall description.
Step 2
When the ideas are collected the children then begin to use them to write phrases, selecting their favourite thing to describe from each of the rows. This encourages the children to look at the features carefully – in the example above ‘water’ is mentioned in more than one of the senses, this opens up a potential link between the sentences to again further enhance the description.
Some example phrases:
The taste of the fresh air fills my lungs.
The dogs jump from the water up on to my body.
I hear the sound of gorillas laughing.
Step 3
Taking the base sentence written above the children then ‘zoom in’ on the feature that they have written about to look at how they could use adjectives or adverbs to add more detail, This will give a fuller picture and provides a more enriching experience for the reader.
The playful dogs jump enthusiastically from the cold water up on to my unsuspecting body.
The sound of the ginormous, cheerful gorillas laughing filled the air.
This is where the link is made with the Exciting Sentences and we will often have a target sentence type that we will be working on to try and include as well.
Step 4
Combine the sentences using a range of prepositions or prepositional phrases.
The sound of the ginormous, cheerful gorillas laughing filled the air. Beneath the gorillas a pair of playful dogs jump enthusiastically in the water of an ornamental fountain. In the distance a line of colourful, unusual tree trunks stand below dark green leaves. The park is a happy place, filled with laughter, joy and fun.
These 4 steps are worked on repeated over a series of lessons so that the routines and methodologies become embedded. When we move on from descriptive writing as a genre tool I will often use picture prompts to reinforce and sharpen the children’s ability to describe with detail. At this point in their development children will need to be able to add detail to sentences and phrases before they can judiciously decide which sentences are more effective when parsed of detail.
In the next article I will talk about another structure to develop detail in children’s writing that I have used most recently.
All comments welcomed.
The year of living purposefully, goals: 1. Read a book a week. 2. 1 blog post minimum per week. 3. Visit 3 foreign places I’ve never been.
Journey... 