Descriptive writing - Show don't tell.

Today in Language the Grade 4 students worked on their descriptive writing skills.
We watched a short clip 'Ormie the pig wants a cookie' and then thought about some of the emotions that Ormie was feeling.

Ormie the pig wants a cookie

We thought about the word determined and how we know he was determined. We also thought about the word frustrated and what that looks like.

We discussed how describing rather than telling an emotion is very powerful in our writing.

For example instead of saying "He felt frustrated" we could write ...
"He was biting his nails and pulling his hair. He was pacing back and forth with his fists clenched. He turned and punched the fridge".

The students then looked up fiction books in the classroom and found passages where writers have described a feeling rather than simply state the feeling. They wrote them on cards, shared them with the class and students tried to guess the feeling.