The engrossing words from the lecturer as the silence of the class listened to both familiar and unknown facts about descriptive writing, shook the creative juices in our expired brains. The otherwise stagnant "kwas" got activated as the lesson swiftly unfolded that day. Every well-connected detail: sharing prerequisites about descriptive writing, studying kernel sentences, creating five senses clusters, learning the transitional words and phrases, was rather rightly digested.
Opinion
The belief that infants are only able to produce kernel sentences is definitely a myth. Modelling to students how to improve a descriptive piece with the use of several pieces of vague writing will help improve their writing skills. The students are only capable of reproducing what we as their literacy teachers model in class. Since, teachers have adopted more of a drilling technique to teaching the infants, students will grow up with the view of producing work in one set format, which is whatever they learned in their previous grades. The infants are not blank slates- allow them to freely speak about pictures with their outrageous imaginations added to whatever can clearly be seen.
Fact
- The main purpose of descriptive writing is to describe or provide details about a person, place, event or thing, so that a vivid picture can be formed in the readers' minds. The writing of a descriptive piece involves the use of the five senses - hear, sight, smell, touch/ feel and taste. In doing such, it is important to make students see that their story or passage has become more interesting and engaging after including the descriptive words and phrases.
- The teacher of literacy can adopt different classroom strategies and approaches in helping students develop 'healthy' descriptive passages. Some of these strategies include writer's workshop, RAFT, read-write-pair-share and guided writing practice. As mentioned above, it is necessary to model to students the steps in the writing process when teaching writing. (look at video below)
- Engaging students in descriptive writing helps to build their vocabulary and speech deliveries. It can also improve their overall writing skills as they will be exposed to ways of being creative with their words in the use of figurative language. Students will learn to use metaphors, exaggerations, adverbial phrases and adjectival phrases to make their writing more interesting and original.
- It is also important to note that a good descriptive piece of writing is very organized. For example, the use of transitional words and phrases of time, place and order of importance. In the description of a person, one would start with physical appearance and move to personality and then behaviour.
- Descriptive writing can be incorporated across the curriculum in the different content areas. For instance, students in Grade One can orally describe for a Social Studies lesson, the buildings in their community or their experience at the La Marguerite Flower Festival.
Entry by Jina Jonas, Leah Giman-Satoute & Shaquille Aldonza
