Word Carpet

by Louise Banks,
Assistant Lead Teacher of English

The LO for this Y9  lesson was: Can I write a successful piece of descriptive writing?

 

Often students do not understand the importance of planning for extended pieces of writing and overall they are reluctant to plan. As I wanted them to plan but without realising that they were actually planning I engaged them in creating the word carpet (or cloth, depending on the space you have available.)

Students were shown a short clip of a battle scene and whilst they watching this they were asked to imagine if they were in that battle what would they be able to see, hear, feel, smell and taste. On the table in front of them was a pile of blank sheets of paper. They were asked to write one idea from the above on a separate sheet of paper ( i.e metallic mud, blood curdling cries)  and to place these on the table in front of them. As they were working in groups, these soon filled the desk or floor with many different ideas. They were also instructed, as a challenge, to convert their ideas into similes, metaphors or to use interesting adjectives, verbs, adverbs etc ( i.e the mist was like hell’s steam)

Once this task was complete, as a group, they were asked to review the ideas and verbally describe the battle to one another using the ideas on the word cloth/carpet. Each member was given a number and when it was their turn they were given a set amount of time to speak i.e 30 seconds.

After this they were then asked to choose their five favourite ideas and place them in front of them. Once they had these ideas they were then set the task to write a descriptive piece of writing using the ideas in front of them and, of course, success criteria from the mark scheme.

AO6

-          I am using varied punctuation.

-          I am using different sentence forms.

-          I am using standard English.

-          I am using varied vocabulary.

AO5

-          I know who I am writing for.

-          I am using paragraphs.

-          I am using varied techniques.

-          I am using varied sentence lengths

The work produced was of a much better quality as they had inadvertently collaboratively planned their writing task!!!