Teaching Writing: Children

Lesson 3: Teaching Descriptive Writing

Presenting Their Work

Shell Stories

After your students have had some practice with descriptive writing, here is a fun way to display their work. I used shells for this activity, but you can use other objects such as leaves, apples, buttons - any object can be used as long as you have enough of the same object, but with slight differences, for each student.

Bring in your collection of objects. Let each child choose one to write a description of. I used shells for two reasons - I have a pretty large collection and there was enough variety among the shells for students to each have a unique one to write about.

As described in the previous lessons, students should brainstorm and then write descriptions of their shells. Be sure they concentrate on the size, color, and special edging, and shape. Students should also be reminded that they want the descriptions to be detailed enough for a reader to be able to pick out their particular shell from the whole group.

After taking the descriptions through the stages of the writing process, have final copies made, and display the stories on a bulletin board or on the wall outside your classroom. Next, assign a number to each shell, and display the shells in a box below the stories. Challenge passers-by to read the descriptions and see if they can match the shell to the story written about it. You can make this a formal guess by leaving slips of paper and pencils nearby. Guesses can be recorded and placed in a jar near the display.

This makes for a great interactive display, and one students really enjoy sharing with their friends in other classes.

  1  2  3  4  5