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"Snapshot" Exercises & Sensory Detail Word Bank
Read a sample of creative descriptive writing to your science class. Discuss how writing can be used to record and communicate observations that scientists make. Reading selections and thought-provoking questions are suggested. Also...
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Improving Descriptive Writing: Painting an Original Picture
Descriptive writing is rich in sensory appeals and paints pictures in the minds of readers. Show young writers how to use an on-line thesaurus and a cliché website to create fresh, descriptive writing. The presentation ends with an...
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Descriptive Writing: Using Art to Inspire description
Write with the senses! Try using art to inspire writers to consider all of the senses. Here, the class is divided in half. Each group looks at one of two images, imagines the senses that would be engaged, and records answers to five...
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Language Arts: Telling a Painting's Story
Use art museum paintings as inspiration for your class's creative writing works. Observing the paintings closely, middle and high schoolers list details and write descriptions. Their completed stories are displayed on bulletin boards...
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Sensory Visualization chart
For this sensory visualization worksheet, students are provided with spaces to record their senses after a teacher has given them a visual prompt.
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Using Descriptive Language
Students examine the use of adjectives in a product review, then write their own descriptive review. In this writing and word usage lesson, students first analyze the choice of adjectives in a New York Times article about the iPhone,...
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Let's Go Exploring!
Use a Courbet painting of a cave or tunnel opening to reinforce the importance of descriptive writing. Writers of all ages use sensory details to describe what the scene depicts as they pretend to be in the painting. Then they imagine...
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Lesson Plan 12: Writing With All Your Senses
What does an ice cream sundae sound like? Challenge young writers to move beyond visual descriptions and craft details that appeal to all five senses. The examples provided by the script in this resource show pupils how to create rich...
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Writing Descriptions of "My Favorite Place"
Students write a descriptive writing piece. In this writing activity, students use a visualization exercise to add more descriptions to their writing.
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Car For Sale!
Car For sale! For this GED prep lesson, writers develop a classified advertisement to sell a car. After a discussion of precise words and phrases, telling details, and sensory language, sellers draft their ad for review, revision and...
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Show, Don't Tell: The First Rule of Writing
Model for young writers how to create pictures in the minds of readers with a series of slides that demonstrate how sensory appeals enliven writing. The presentation includes opportunities for viewers to practice showing writing.
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Narrative Writing
Imagine a day in the life of a child who has to work 12-14 hours a day, seven days a week. After viewing images and reading stories of child laborers, class members select an image and write a richly detailed narrative about a typical...
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Writing to describe
Students examine descriptive writing. In this writing lesson, students listen to an audio version of the diary of Lt. Polly Hatchard and her expedition to the South Pole. Students explore the components of descriptive writing and...
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Making a Treasure Your Own: Lesson Two
Students write an essay describing the Curtis Center and what they learned there. In this descriptive writing essay, students discuss the five paragraph essay and review sensory discoveries from their trip. Students draft an outline and...
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Putting It Together
Students read aloud the book "Courage" by Bernard Waber and discuss the examples that compromise the defintion of courage. They describe another word such as joy and work with a partner or group to brainstorm and write sentences of...
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Irish Eyes: Taking a Look at Local Landscape
Direct your class’s attention to the elements that make their community unique. After examining sample travel brochures, groups select something from their community to use as the subject, and then research, create, and publish a...
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Oliver Twist Goes to Hollywood
How does Oliver Twist, the novel written by Charles Dickens, compare with its screenplay adaptation? Although the activity doesn't require learners to have read the novel, the similarities and differences of the highlighted passages...
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Photojournalism
Learners choose a historical or present-day event to portray through photographs. They narrate this event with photographs and text to communicate its significance in history or our current daily lives.
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Writing a Personal Narrative
Students analyze a variety of rhetorical devices including metaphor, hyperbole, metonomy and imagery. They read samples of autobiographies, work in groups to complete writing skills activities and produce individual personal narratives.