SETTING DESCRIPTION EXAMPLES: 10 model texts, checklists & worksheets

This pack is designed to help students produce powerful, high-quality descriptive writing. It aims to help students to identify and use the following features:

• The five senses (see, hear, smell, feel, taste)
• High-quality vocabulary
• Figurative language (similes, metaphors, personification, alliteration)
• Words and phrases to create mood and atmosphere

The pack includes:

• 10 model/ example/ WAGOLL setting description texts, with pictures. Each text describes a different setting (stormy sea, rainforest, desert, funfair etc).
• A worksheet to support students to identify the key features within the example texts.
• A ‘Create Your Own Setting Description’ writing task.
• A ‘key features checklist’ to aid self/peer/teacher review.

Background:

I decided to create this resource after reading through some stories that my class had written. One thing really stood out to me: a lack of good quality description.

How to fix the problem? I knew the first place to start was to provide them with some examples of high-quality descriptive writing. However, it takes a lot of teacher time to find and copy examples from existing texts, or to write new examples from scratch. For this reason, I decided to create a bank of example paragraphs to use myself, and to share with other teachers.

Along with the example texts and related worksheet, I have also added a writing task and ‘key features checklist’. This aims to support students to take features from the example texts, and use them in their own writing.

These resources could be used in a stand-alone lesson, or as part of a wider unit. By the end of the session(s), students should be able to write a high-quality setting description, packed full of powerful vocabulary and figurative language.