Excellent Assessed Lesson: Descriptive Writing

How I used these resources:

I teach a Year 6 class.

Leading up to the assessed lesson I used the PowerPoint to to re-cap pupil understanding of how to use the five senses whilst describing and how to use them to create similes, metaphors etc.

I showed the example of how an author changes the mood and atmosphere through description (Descriptive Mood Setting).

I then show them the picture of a beautiful forest and ask them to brainstorm similes, metaphors, personification etc about the forest.

I then show them a good description of the forest and ask them discuss in pairs how they would be able to change the atmosphere.

Model writing a 'dark' description of the forest using suggestions from the pupils. The 'good' description should remain visible as you do this so that the pupils can use the sentence structure and simply edit it.

I then ask the class to write a description on a given topic. I have done this on both a villain's lair and a roller-coaster. I let them decide whether they wanted to write a 'good' or 'dark' description. You may want to split the class in half for this to ensure you have examples of both at the end of the lesson.

I have provided the differentiated worksheets that I gave pupils which includes a success criteria.

I suggest peer marking and reading descriptions aloud to the whole class at the end of the lesson.