This Lesson's Title:
Painting Places with Words
borrowing Steinbeck's sentence fluency to describe a new setting
This lesson was built for WritingFix after being proposed by NNWP Consultant Madelyn Read. |
T he ideal "mentor text" that can be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the novel Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author, especially from chapter 1 of the book.
Click here to view this book at Amazon.com.
If you are a Washoe County teacher, click here to search for this book at the county library. |
Teacher Instructions & Lesson Resources:
Step one (sharing the published model): Like "Show, don't tell," the expression "Paint a picture in your reader's mind" has become almost cliché in the writing classroom. If you've ever caught yourself saying those words to your students, ask yourself, "Have I really shown them what that means in an actual piece of writing?" If not, use the first few paragraph of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men to show them the meaning of "Paint a picture in your reader's mind."
In those very first two paragraphs of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, a picture is painted through words:
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees--willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter's flooding; and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them. Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of 'coons, and with the spread pads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark.
There is a path through the willows and among the sycamores, a path beaten hard by boys coming down from the ranches to swim in the deep pool, and beaten hard by tramps who come wearily down from the highway in the evening to jungle-up near water. In front of the low horizontal limb of a giant sycamore there is an ash pile made by many fires; the limb is worn smooth by men who have sat on it.
And this is just a start of what lies ahead in this marvelous novel. The words that Steinbeck chooses: the adjectives, excellent and thoughtful; the nouns, precise; the color words; the texture words; the fact that we not only see, but hear this setting make these paragraphs stand out as an example of classic writing.
Talk about the details in these paragraphs with your students. Analyze the details. Make a classroom chart that classifies into columns the most memorable images, the texture words, and the color words. Draw a line underneath Steinbeck's final word in these columns, and then add original ideas for images, texture, and color words through a class brainstorm.
Have students, in small groups, write an impersonation of the entire first paragraph (or at least the first few sentences of it). Their group impersonation needs to borrow the sentence structure and some of the verbs, but change the images and adjectives by describing a completely different place. Here is a teacher model of the first few sentences being impersonated:
A few blocks away from my house, a lonely highway drops too close to one of my neighbor's fences and runs black and yellow, black and yellow. The asphalt is warm to the touch, for it has baked and twinkled under the summer sun before creeping so close to my neighbor's yard. On one side of the highway the various litter piles thrown from cars march towards to the strong and lonely fence, but on the opposite side of the road the bushes are lined with blossoms... (etc)
Have each group share its impersonation while other groups follow along with the original Steinbeck text. After each group shares, require other groups to share what they thought the best original image was in the other group's impersonation. Write those images down where all your students can see them. Also...keep a list of all the settings the groups have used in their impersonation paragraphs.
Inform your writers that each individual will now--without using Steinbeck as a guide--describe one of the places described by another group with its impersonation paragraph. They will not be allowed to look at either Steinbeck or the group's impersonation paragraph as they write. Their task is NOT to remember the exact sentence structures used; instead, their task is to remember some of the most powerful images and to put those images in a paragraph that a) paints a picture of a place with words while it b) maintains flowing and original sentence structures.
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Step six (publishing for the portfolio): When they are finished revising and have second drafts, invite your students to come back to this piece once more during an upcoming writer's workshop block. Their stories might become a longer story, a more detailed piece, or the beginning of a series of pieces about the story they started here. Students will probably enjoy creating an illustration for this story as they get ready to publish it for their portfolios.
Interested in publishing student work on-line? We invite student writers to post final drafts of their original at WritingFix's Community of Student Writers. This is a safe-to-use blog for students and teachers. No writing is posted until it is approved by the moderator. Contact us at publish@writingfix.com if you have questions about getting your students published.
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