brainstorming three sensory details about a personal topic
before writing about it
How can using your five senses help you tell a better story?
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Ideas for Teachers from Teachers How do you teach young writers to carefully select sensory details to include in a piece of personal writing?
Example Blurb: I love to use all of Patricia MacLachlan's books when I am helping students explore powerful sensory details. Her All the Places to Love is one of the sweetest memoirs ever written, and its a marvelous book to share and show what strong sensory details sound like in writing. It's always useful to make a five-column chart before you read the book--one column for each sense--and to have the students listen for words and phrases in the text that help the reader feel the same sensations as the author.
I try to incorporate concrete objects for my first and second graders to write about. My most succesfuls lesson included apples. We brainstormed "juicy" words, similes, and even looked in the thesaurus for more interesting words.
I sliced up apples, passed out paper, and had students write about how the apples tasted, smelled, and sounded.
I teach 2nd grade students and have been influenced by Reggie Routman and
Shelley Harwayn, both of whom value the personal narrative for young
writers. However, trying to get young children to move beyond the "then
and thens" is a challenge.
I would recommend reading Letting Swift River Go by Jane Yolen and
illustrated by Barbara Cooney prior to a lesson on writing a personal
narrative using at least three of your senses. It is a wonderful,
historical story told through the eyes of a young girl about her "thriving
hometown being transformed into a wilderness and then submerged." There
are beautiful descriptions of her town, a reference to tasting the sap
from the maple trees, how the waters moved in slowly and silently, and
other beautiful descriptive language.
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I try to incorporate concrete objects for my first and second graders to write about. My most succesfuls lesson included apples. We brainstormed "juicy" words, similes, and even looked in the thesaurus for more interesting words.
I sliced up apples, passed out paper, and had students write about how the apples tasted, smelled, and sounded. 
