|
Sensory Writing follows on nicely from Microscope Sentences; in fact, it is beneficial to do one activity after the other on the same topic. That way the children have spent time exploring and developing their ideas from different angles.
Sensory Writing |
Aim
|
Sensory Writing is about teaching students to draw on their senses to create an environment with which their reader can connect. It encourages children to explore their senses in regards to a prompt and write as if they are standing within the scene.
Helping children to lean on their senses when writing, helps them to develop ways to effectively use language in their compositions. |
Personal note: I find this strategy a great culmination of microscope sentences and prepositional poetry. Without worrying about characters and complications, children can focus on using their new understanding of language to create a descriptive environment. Weaving this into other texts is a challenge for further down the track. |
Encourage children to take risks. Try a new approach, use new vocabulary, mix around the sentence structure. This is the development of crafting skills: let them explore.
Pre-Writing
Children use a planning sheet to help them plan some descriptive writing using their senses. The more the children can write in the boxes the better as it gives them more material to use to write their sentences/paragraph. Using the prewriting phase to generate words that can be used in writing will create a more fluent writing experience. To do this, make sure that multiple adjectives and verbs are chosen for the items that can be seen.
Depending on the needs of the students. The planning can be done as a whole class, with peers or individually.
Writing
Children can then use the words to create descriptive sentences or an entire paragraph. Students can combine ideas to help create a setting. Once familiar with the format of sensory writing, teachers can introduce more advanced parts of speech to help student writing become more sophisticated and descriptive
See |
Describe adj/verb |
Feel |
Hear |
Imagine |
boat |
old wooden sailing |
wind rocking |
waves crew |
pirates |
|
The old wooden boat is sailing in the deep blue ocean. The waves splash against the ship rocking the crew side to side. A pirate flag blows in the wind
|
|
Model and then encourage the following steps to elicit creative writing:
|
Personal note: Always consider how we provide entry points for all writers. The prewriting stage provides students with a sentence almost ready to go: a subject, an adjective and a verb. Allowing children to write a range of descriptive sentences about a prompt as opposed to a paragraph means that they can worry less about overall cohesion and focus directly on exploring their creative side through sentence structure, grammar and vocabulary. |
These examples highlight many of the teaching points above. They especially showcase the power that verbs bring to a descriptive text:
“The wind whistles as the wolf howls under the eerie moon. Foxes hunt while mice scatter amongst fallen leaves. The castle shines through the blackness. Owls perch on the twisted branches.” – 8-year-old girl
“The wind is whistling through the gnarled branches. The fox hunts for food as the dark night sky clears. The cold flags are flowing through the cold night breeze. The dark eerie sky is starting to clear and the animals are scurrying out of their burrows. The foxes are rustling through thick scrub; hunting for prey. The leaves are brushing through the wind.” – 8-year-old-girl
“The wind whistles as the wolf howls under the eerie moon. Foxes hunt while mice scatter amongst fallen leaves. The castle shines through the blackness. Owls perch on the twisted branches.” – 8-year-old girl
“The wind is whistling through the gnarled branches. The fox hunts for food as the dark night sky clears. The cold flags are flowing through the cold night breeze. The dark eerie sky is starting to clear and the animals are scurrying out of their burrows. The foxes are rustling through thick scrub; hunting for prey. The leaves are brushing through the wind.” – 8-year-old-girl
What I love about this activity is that all students can participate. At a basic level, students are taking the two words already created in the pre-writing stage and then putting them together to make a sentence.
Initial teaching should focus on the subject and verb being used to create a sentence that makes sense. Following on from this, students can begin to explore the ideas of when, where, why and how? By thinking about these question prompts, students should be able to create a longer sentence. Finally, students should be introduced to adjectives to begin to add depth to their subjects.
Self-Monitoring
Self-monitoring focuses on the secretarial writing skills we want the students to have ownership over.
Is there punctuation?
Does it make sense?
Have I underlined words I'm unsure of or think are spelt incorrectly?
Can others read my work?
By introducing these goals and following it up with reviewing strategies, children, from the beginning, become responsible for the editing of their own work. This is an important step in building successful writers. Depending on the age group, it could be beneficial to select just one goal on which to focus; however, all goals are critical to the foundation of continued writing success and it is recommended that both are set for each task. Different goals should be the focus for different students.
With this in mind, we can develop the self-monitoring skills of children at the same time as their deeper understanding of language.
Is there punctuation?
Does it make sense?
Have I underlined words I'm unsure of or think are spelt incorrectly?
Can others read my work?
By introducing these goals and following it up with reviewing strategies, children, from the beginning, become responsible for the editing of their own work. This is an important step in building successful writers. Depending on the age group, it could be beneficial to select just one goal on which to focus; however, all goals are critical to the foundation of continued writing success and it is recommended that both are set for each task. Different goals should be the focus for different students.
With this in mind, we can develop the self-monitoring skills of children at the same time as their deeper understanding of language.
Feedback
Feedback for this strategy should focus around word selection and sentence structure.
|
Adjectives: Have adjectives been used? Are the adjectives effective? Are there too many adjectives? Verbs: Could there be a stronger verb? If we change the verb (antonym/synonym), how does it affect the sentence? Can we remove relating verbs to make the sentence more active? Sentence Beginning Do the sentence beginnings vary? Does the start of the sentence focus on what you want the reader to focus on? E.g. Crawling, vines stretched out over the house. |
Remember, the type of feedback you give will depend on the level of the class.
Where to Next?Being able to effectively use language to write a descriptive sentence or paragraph is extremely powerful. The next step is learning how to weave this sensory descriptive writing in to all texts so that a powerful connection can be made with the audience.
|
Descriptive writing is all about helping your reader feel like they are standing there in the scene that is being described. To effectively do that, we need to place ourselves in that scene so we can create the real-life imagery that is needed to connect our audience.