Room 2 Ruminations
Creative Writing for Kids & Teens | Sensory Detail Deep-dive: Writing Sense of Taste & Smell
A sensory detail deep-dive for young authors and teachers designed to build descriptive writing skills, specifically around imagery that evokes sense of taste and smell.
Learn how to write sentences that rot and stink or tempt and zing in this Descriptive Writing BootCamp video. We'll dive into how to craft sensory details with action verbs that show instead of tell, with a focus on describing the tastes and smells of your fictional world.
Whether you’re writing action-packed adventure, blood-spattered horror, or a subtle and nuanced portrait of frenemies, getting a feel for strong verbs and developing an understanding of the power of precision will make your slasher script more gory, your thriller more gripping and your fantasy more magical. We'll walk through examples and revision tips to help make your fiction, memoir, script, TV series, poem, song lyric, or video game narrative pop.
If you’re an educator looking to teach descriptive writing skills, our companion resources below offer ready-to-use teaching tools like show-don’t-tell/descriptive writing graphic organizers to scaffold revision and mentor sentence studies that highlight elements of craft like point of view, figurative language, sensory detail, character, and conflict.
Geared toward young writers who want to sharpen their writing chops, as well as reluctant writers who need a little extra engagement, these EDITABLE, DIFFERENTIATED & GAMIFIED revising & editing practice tools can help deepen your students' grasp of foundational skills for strong writing.
Save time with these ready-to-use materials designed to support Grade 4+ writers (and their teachers!) in classroom or homeschool settings:
FINDING FILTERS: Descriptive Writing Revising/Editing Practice Show-don't-tell Anchor Chart & Quizizz Game
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Descriptive-Writing-RevisingEditing-Practice-Show-dont-tell-Anchor-Chart-Game-7935927
Verb Word Bank & Descriptive Writing/Show-Don't-Tell/Part of Speech Anchor Chart
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Verb-Word-Bank-Descriptive-WritingShow-Dont-TellPart-of-Speech-Anchor-Chart-5181261
PART CHARTS: Revision Workshop Scaffold | Show-Don’t-Tell (Explode the Moment) Descriptive Writing Graphic Organizers & Sensory Detail Worksheets
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Descriptive-Writing-Graphic-Organizers-Explode-the-Moment-Show-Dont-Tell-8123139
Imagery Writing Mentor Author Study featuring passages from work by Gloria Whelan, Thanhha Lai
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Descriptive-Writing-Graphic-Organizers-SmellTaste-Gloria-Whelan-Thanhha-Lai-8753907
Preview the entire resource here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9o8hjPr7bHY
About the Resource
Teach sentence-level mastery of writing fundamentals with this editable writing or revision workshop resource, featuring passages from Gloria Whelan's Goodbye, Vietnam and Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again. This sensory detail deep-dive is designed to build descriptive writing skills, specifically around imagery evoking sense of taste and smell.
This Mentor Author study for grades 4-8 includes:
• A 5-minute intro explainer video linked in a Google slide to prevent YouTube distractions, embedded with discussion questions to consider as you watch.
• Link to a Quizizz game that builds skills introduced in the video.
• Mentor author excerpts.
• Discussion questions to guide an exploration of effective ways to describe taste and smell, also available as a class game on Quizizz.
• Graphic organizers and sentence frames and starters to scaffold student experimentation with mentor author strategies.
• Concrete Adjective Word Bank and Motion Verb Word Bank to help power precision in sensory descriptions.
• Links to student writing samples that model approaches to applying the mentor author techniques under consideration.
• Digital, printable & flexible formatting: this is an editable Google doc you can easily alter to fit your needs and/or copy and paste into your learning platform of choice. Delete or modify to customize and differentiate. If you download as a PDF to print, each white box will appear in landscape orientation on a separate page.