4FN7 – Reading & Writing – Descriptive Writing

How do FreeNode lessons work?

FreeNodes are instructor-led schooling lessons with a unique approach, granting you the freedom to independently teach using a personalized lesson plan. This autonomy enables you to tailor your lessons to suit students’ individual needs, learning styles, and interests.

To use a FreeNode, read the provided class outline & follow the formatting provided for each class. Make sure to touch on the Theocratic Connection in each class. Follow the outline closely so it is aligned with our main at-home curriculum.

How Do I Use the FreeNode?

Read this lesson plan before class to familiarize yourself with the ideas and concepts you’ll be teaching the students. You may print this page out if you need to use it as a reference point during live classes.

This lesson is a guide, but feel free to expand on the content or decrease/increase what you teach depending on the learning levels of the students in your class or the amount of time you have to cover the material.

Can I show videos in FN classes?

Yes, feel free to include additional material to supplement the class lesson material. Videos, Physical Objects, Games, Activities, etc. are okay to share in live classes.

Videos should have no advertisements or logos and should be viewed by you before showing them to the students to ensure no offensive or questionable content is included.

The video should make up only 1-3 minutes of the live class and should not take the place of instructor-led instruction. Videos should be supplementary only.

How do bookmarks work?

Bookmarks help you keep track of lessons you’re going to teach in future live classes. The bookmarks you see are for all your bookmarked lessons across all grades.

You can bookmark a lesson by visiting the lesson you want to bookmark and clicking the “bookmark” button in the bookmark section.

You can remove a single bookmark by visiting a lesson you’ve bookmarked and clicking the “bookmark” button again to unbookmark it.

You can clear all of your bookmarks by clicking the “clear all bookmarks” button. Be careful, this will erase all of your bookmarks.

Class Lesson Plan

Objectives:

Students will understand the concept of descriptive writing, its purpose, and how it contributes to creating vivid and engaging stories. The lesson will guide students through the challenges of descriptive writing and provide practical tips and techniques.

Materials:

Whiteboard
Visual aids (videos of scenes that can be described with vivid descriptive language)
Dictionary or access to online word tools
Examples of descriptive writing passages (optional)

Introduction (5 minutes):

Begin with a brief discussion on how imagination and communication are gifts from God. Emphasize the importance of using these gifts effectively, which includes descriptive writing. Explain that descriptive writing is an important part of helping your reader to imagine the events in your story and that it paints a picture in your reader’s mind so that they can fully visualize what’s going on in the story.

Theocratic Connections:

Read and analyze a Bible passage that vividly describes nature, like Psalms 104:10-14. Discuss how the verses use descriptive language to paint a picture of nature. Connect the concept of descriptive writing to the beauty of imagination as a gift from God and highlight the fact that many Bible accounts were written in a way that make it easy to imagine the scene when we read.

Activity 1 – Understanding Descriptive Writing (10 minutes):

Explain that writing that is very descriptive can help create a strong sense of mood and atmosphere and that descriptive writing is to makes the readers feel something. Make sure that students understand that the overall feeling or atmosphere of a story is called its mood.

Give examples of descriptive writing like: For example, instead of saying “the sun was shining,” you could say “the sun was smiling down on the world.”

Activity 2 – Techniques for Descriptive Writing (10 minutes):

Explain how to use vivid verbs, descriptive adjective, and specific nouns to engage the 5 senses to help the reader “see”, “hear”, “taste”, “touch” and “smell” the events as they imagine what they read. Explain the technique of asking the questions like “where, when, why and how” to think of more details to add to a description. Show students how to use dictionaries, thesauruses and other online tools that to find words that will bring color to their writing.

Explain that being observant will help students to write more descriptively. For example, taking a moment to really look at the things they see in nature, absorbing all the details, noting the sights, smells, etc, will help them to create a vivid description of the events they see.

(Optional) Writing Exercise: Show students a short video of something very colorful and vivid. (e.g. someone taking shelter in a rainstorm) After watching the video, ask them to imagine what it must be like to be the subject of the video and then describe the experience. (e.g. What you do you think you would feel if you were this man caught in a rainstorm? How does it feel as you run? Sloshy and wet? Cold? etc…) Ask students to describe the scene using as many of the 5 senses as they can.

Conclusion (5 minutes):

Summarize key points, highlighting the importance of being observant and using 5 senses to take in and describe events.

Assessment:

Evaluate student understanding of descriptive writing through participation in class discussions, engagement in writing activities, and the quality of descriptive writing exercises.