Biography and Autobiography - Lesson 9 - Describing a Place from the Past PowerPoint

In a lesson centred around the art of descriptive writing, students are taught how to bring a place from the past vividly to life using adjectives and sensory details. The objective is to help students understand the use of adjectives to enhance their descriptions and to explore examples of descriptive writing. The lesson encourages students to use their senses to create a more engaging and effective description. By using adjectives, such as 'raging' instead of just 'river', the writing not only gains depth but also tension, painting a more dynamic and vivid picture for the reader. The lesson includes exercises where students identify adjectives in sentences and practise inserting adjectives into sentence frameworks to enrich their descriptions.

As the lesson progresses, the students are guided through the process of planning their descriptive writing. They are prompted to think about a place that holds significance to them and to use a spider diagram to organise their sensory impressions of that place, such as what they can smell, see, touch, hear, and taste. By comparing different drafts of descriptive paragraphs, students learn how the use of effective adjectives, verbs, and similes can transform a piece of writing. The lesson demonstrates that a well-crafted description can make a reader feel as though they are experiencing the place firsthand, thus illustrating the power of descriptive writing in bringing a place from the past into the present moment of the reader's imagination.