Painting a picture with words

Blog #5 : October 19th - 20th 2017

Last week’s lecture was focused on Descriptive writing. We learnt about the purpose and elements of a descriptive piece, how to teach descriptive writing, common problems students face with the genre of writing and some strategies that can be used to solve such problems.

As it relates to the things that we learnt about how to teach descriptive writing, we discovered that as teachers, we cannot give students descriptive writing tasks without introducing them to the elements of this genre. We must teach the students about sensory words, the use of figurative language in their writing and how to use them adequately. The sensory words are those words which represent the five (5) senses and the lecturer provided us with  two simple ways (use of tables or charts and the five sense clusters) that we can use to teach these words.

 

Moreover, we learnt that as teachers we should teach students the importance of word choice and to use specific information such as specific behaviours and activities.

One thing that we liked about last week’s lesson was the reading of the descriptive passage before the beginning of the lecture. This was very useful because we were able to hear what a well-written descriptive piece sounds like. Additionally, we liked that the lecturer asked us questions about the passage and highlighted areas that we can focus on when using the passage to teach a particular concept. For example, the passage can be used to teach adjectives and adverbs.

Another aspect of the lesson that we liked was the teachable moments that the lecturer made use of during the session. Although we learnt about when to use ‘me’ and ‘I’ in sentences and synonyms for the five senses (for example; smell or olfactory) in the past, we needed a reminder and the teachable moments were excellent reinforcers. Also, we liked that the lecturer took the time to ensure that we understood the information presented in the slides.

In light of all that we learnt and liked about last week’s lecture, we only have one suggestion. We suggest that the lecturer always capitalize on the teachable moments because they are informative and we learn and/or are reminded of certain things that we should know as teachers.