Here you will see the template to a worksheet I developed to guide 5th grade

students through descriptive writing practice. The lesson fell in the midst of a
Narrative Writing Unit, where students were required to write descriptively and
promote a chosen theme. This particular lesson acted as the introduction to
the writing process. Students took a bland passage, and re-wrote it to be more
interesting and exciting through the use of descriptive writing.

As I planned this lesson, I focused on ways to make the writing accessible to
all students. Knowing my class, I knew that I had a small number of extremely
strong writers, a large number of on-grade-level writers, and another small
group of below-grade-level writers. Furthermore, I knew many of my students
experienced a type of "writers block" despite their prowess with writing. To
differentiate, I provided scaffolds to help students overcome these challenges,
and to help students generate descriptive writing ideas. As you can see on
the worksheet, I prompted students with questions that would elicit descriptive
responses, and highlighted these areas within the text. Through this
differentiation, students were able to complete the activity independently and
with high degrees of success.













On March 5
th
of the year 2423, a space ship landed (How did the ship land?) on Earth. The people of

Earth were scared (Is there a better word for scared you can use? Explain why the people are scared).

The space ship had very strange designs all over it (What did the designs looks like? What do the

designs mean?) The leader of Earth tried to talk with the space ship. She sent radio messages, but the

space ship said nothing (Include some sensory details here, what did it look/feel/smell like?). After a

while, the space ship opened (Describe how the ship opened). Three aliens came out. They looked

nothing like humans (Add a describing word here, were they ugly, beautiful, tiny squishy?). The aliens

looked around, made a face (What type of facial expression?), then flew away in their space ship

(Explain why they flew away.).