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Mar. 10, 2006
Friday Lesson
A bit on descirptive writing...you can check my links in my sidebar under "Writer's Workshop" if you would like more information or ideas:
My daughter is only seven, so we are doing a lot of oral language practice rather than actually writing. We are describing things we find and expanding vocabulary as well at looking for elements of text structure in the texts we read (we've looked at recipes, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day..., by Judith Viorst, and are getting ready to look at some excerpts from Charlotte's Web and the bible. All this can be done in writing for older children.
Here are some ideas for prompts:
Artwork...old calendars work well for a cheap way of amassing quality artwork for study. Looking at the artwork while reading an art review on it can really help children see the connections between the image and the descriptive writing. Then students can have a chance to write their own reviews.
Find some food reviews in a magazine or online. Try making the dishes and eat them. Compare the review with your own experiences. Write reviews of your favorite foods...even if it is plain old mac and cheese. Sometimes writing fancy reviews for everyday food can be a lot of fun.
Look at The Snowman, by Raymond Briggs. Have your child verbally tell you the story through the pictures. An interesting activity to try is to give one picture in a series to each child (mom and/or dad can play if you don't have enough children...or just because) and have each person write a description of their picture. Put together, you should have an excerpt from the story that could be woven into an interesting narrative, full of lovely details.
Another book that encourages careful examination is Something's Not Quite Right, paingings by Guy Billout. I do not particularly like his description of what he is trying to accomplish on the back of the book, but the pictures themselves are visually interesting. The titles provide interesting vocabulary practice and discussion of how they relate to the pictures. "Perfection," for example, shows a man laying in a field of red flowers in straight rows. In the sea of red flowers, one yellow one pokes out near the bottom.
Collect some travel brochures and read the descriptions of different places. Create your own travel brochures, focusing on places you have been or have studied about. Using the internet, a child can create some pretty professional looking travel brochures for any place or any time period.
As always, I strongly encourage you to look first at the purpose of the text, and talk about how the author achieves his purpose. Then look at the structure of the text and again talk about how the structure meets the purpose of the text. Then look at more specifics such as word choice and sentence fluency. Try to copy this in your own writing. Just as artists learn from copying masters, writers learn by analyzing and copying master authors (not just rote copying, but discerning the principles of good writing and attempting it on their own.) The Writer's Workshop provides a good structure for doing this with your children on a regular basis.
One thing I caution against is the way I was taught to teach descriptive writing. One activity I remember is giving every child a picture that is very similar. Each child is supposed to describe his picture with such accuracy that a third person can tell which description goes with which picture. Another is to take a picture that is fairly repetitive and have the child write about it. Then cut up the picture and have someone try to put it together based only on the description from the child. This may serve to focus a child on detail and description, but the writing from such activities is boring...both for the author and the reader. It tends to generate disconnected listings of characteristics in the picture. And I have never read a good piece of published descriptive writing that engages in such detail.
The point is for the child to focus on an aspect he wishes to relate and describe it with words in a way that evokes images or experiences in the mind of his readers. The best way I know to do this is to find good examples, analyze them and apply this to writing practice.
homeschooling, Writer's Workshop, teaching writing, descriptive writing, writing, home school
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