Posted by: Sarah Bates

For a lesson on building setting by adding descriptive details, my students wrote a story together. We gave five groups a single piece of paper with a few sentences on it. The sentences had four nouns or phrases written on post-it notes.  The students had to replace the nouns or phrases with something more descriptive.

Here are two of the original sentences:

There was a meadow and in it two animals. The meadow sat between the forest and the mountains.

Now check out is what our students wrote. I especially love the ending!

The Mountain People & The Sea

by La’Kira, Johannah, Ashleigh, Keyoinah, Taheira, Jason, Kaysha, Jamarcus, Robin, Juan, and Nhoa

There was a beautiful, evergreen meadow that was filled with roses filled with glazes of many colors, and in the meadow were ferocious cougars the color of black diamonds. The meadow sat between the dead black trees and the big, tall, scary mountains—as tall as the Himalayas.

In the forest, a big, green, hairy monster lived among the tall, blue trees that reminded him of a nasty, green trombone that he played when he was in middle school. There was a stream running through the forest that ran all the way to the sea. There are sea animals in the water, like whales, sharks, squids, sea turtles, crabs, lobsters, hammerhead sharks, fish and jelly fish.

The quiet town of Seaside was magnificent with ships that honked in the harbor, and was the home of many tough fishermen with eye patches and fierce sailors with scars of shark bites.

The yellow-toothed and grizzly bearded mountain people never went down to the town of Seaside. They keep to themselves in their mountain caves—caves that were darker than a black out at midnight. They spoke a different language than the villagers of Seaside and kept their daughters far away from the sailors.

But, one day, in the meadow between the mountains and the sea, a sailor, who loved the water and liked to feel the breeze through his hair, met a very young girl who loved her home in the mountains. The sailor fell in love with the mountain girl at once.

Because she didn’t understand his language, the sailor sang a beautiful, soft melody that made the angels in Heaven cry. He played his song for her on a handmade, light brown violin with a dark brown handle. The mountain girl fell in love with the sailor’s gorgeous song and his bright blue eyes, filled with love—because every time a man looks at a woman like that, he is giving her the eyes of love.

The sailor and his mountain girl ran away together, sailing away on a lover’s cruise, the sky light blue and pink with love in the air.