What are some fun activities for teaching descriptive writing?
One of my favorite ways to teach descriptive writing is (I think) a form of taboo. Firs, I create a powerpoint (but you need not get that elaborate – I used to do it strictly by writing the sentence on an overhead or directly on the board) with 5-7 sentences that are missing a single descriptive word or phrase. Similes work great for this game too. An example would be “The sky was _____.” This could also be a simile (the sky was as ___ as the ____) Then, the students who are already divided into teams (generally 4-5 teams work well) have exactly 2 minutes to list exactly 5 ways to complete the sentence. They will get 1 point for each ORIGINAL description. This means that if they get loud and other groups hear, they will lose that opportunity for points. It also means that if they are thinking of typical cliches that will probably be on everyone’s board, they will also lose that opportunity for points. Once the 2 minutes is up, I randomly pick a group to start. They read the now descrip
