A nice activity to do with children who write in a series of events when writing narrative at the expense of description. It helps them to ‘say more before’ moving on to the next event and forces them to hold their reader ‘in that moment’ by adding more detail. This example uses Jane Considine’s writing rainbow symbols but would work equally as well with Alan Peat sentences or any literacy techniques you have been working on with your class. Can be used to teach children how to think more carefully about description at the point of writing or when editing their work. It can be edited to suit any text or age group.

This resource can be used as a retrieval/recall task after teaching expanded noun phrases or as part of a lesson on expanded noun phrases. It is suitable for an upper key stage two class. It includes collective, concrete and abstract nouns which have been expanded with adjectives and a prepositional phrase or relative clause. The children need to correctly identify the noun which has been expanded in each sentence before moving on to the next station. There are twelve questions in total, a pupil answer sheet and the answers.