Descriptive Detective Writing
Summer is now upon us (as for us teachers anyway) and I have decided to add more posts on content I created while student teaching. Back in January, during the beginning of my student teaching experience, I was working with my 5th grade students on descriptive writing. To put this skill into practice the students wrote narrative stories. As a class, we discussed how using the five senses allows the reader to be captured by the story, and feel as if they are a part of the story themselves. (It is also amazing how many students still love to use dictionaries when given the chance!)
To work on creative thinking and descriptive writing I decided to have my students take a "trip" to a crime scene, and from this they would develop their stories. Before the students entered the room I changed around our classroom environment. I tipped over some chairs, used caution duct tape to rope off the area, created a money safe out of a cardboard box, put an old soda can in the floor, and added some footprints. Each student was given a detective badge to wear as they scoped out the area. These items all created the scene for our drastic crime, but the students were left to interpret what happened on their own.
I gave each student a crime scene data sheet (shown below) which they used to record anything they saw at the crime scene. This acted as their pre-writing activity, and students were able to write any story outlines, ideas, and details they wanted to include. Students then created their own stories telling what they think happened at the crime scene. These 5th graders wrote some fantastic plots with diverse ideas that were extremely creative, and the details were flying off the pages. By the end of the day our class was full of descriptive writing detectives!
Data Sheet:
To work on creative thinking and descriptive writing I decided to have my students take a "trip" to a crime scene, and from this they would develop their stories. Before the students entered the room I changed around our classroom environment. I tipped over some chairs, used caution duct tape to rope off the area, created a money safe out of a cardboard box, put an old soda can in the floor, and added some footprints. Each student was given a detective badge to wear as they scoped out the area. These items all created the scene for our drastic crime, but the students were left to interpret what happened on their own.
I gave each student a crime scene data sheet (shown below) which they used to record anything they saw at the crime scene. This acted as their pre-writing activity, and students were able to write any story outlines, ideas, and details they wanted to include. Students then created their own stories telling what they think happened at the crime scene. These 5th graders wrote some fantastic plots with diverse ideas that were extremely creative, and the details were flying off the pages. By the end of the day our class was full of descriptive writing detectives!
Data Sheet:
Crime Scene Data
What can I see?
Is anything missing?
My inferences:
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