Words and Pictures...

Length and quality of descriptive writing has been a challenge that I have approached a number of ways this year.

In order to try to develop both the descriptive quality and narrative length of the children's writing, I used a 'level' from the Portal 2 video game.
As before, we explored the game world and stripped the narrative (not that there is much of one).

We engaged in a vocabulary harvest, allowing children to walk and look around the environment, focusing on anything in particular that grabbed their interest. We collected a variety of words and phrases - with the challenge for the higher ability groups to develop similes, metaphor and other literary devices.

A reluctant boy writer creates a page of detailed notes/story planning in 20 minutes!

We explored mind mapping methods, bullet points and lists, and the children were free to use the method they found most effective.

We shared our results, stole excellent words from each other and discussed the success criteria for constructing a narrative based on the environment we had explored.

The writing was good, and most importantly, the level of detail and description had progressed extremely well. For the writing sessions, we would have the game running on the whiteboard, but this time we simply concentrated on the sound-scape the game was creating, and the children wrote happily with this in the background. Occasionally someone would ask me to 'walk' the character to a different location, to change the sounds. We also discussed the colour pallette of the game, and how the chosen colour range affected the mood and atmosphere. Again, all of this sensory input and exploration fed its way into the writing.

After some productive response partner work, we also look at their writing, its grammar and sentence-level construction. All in all, a highly rewarding and productive week's writing all round!

This has, incidentally, helped engage the children beyond literacy; I am using the game engine and level creator as part of the computing work we are doing, and plan to link instructional and explanation texts with programming and coding.