Winter writing activities can be a fun way to get students excited about writing!
Most kids love winter. If you live in a part of the world that gets snow and colder weather, then you and your students have access to the many outdoor winter activities. If you don’t get snow, you can encourage your students’ appreciation of the season by reading lots of winter-themed books and stories.
use winter writing to practice descriptive writing
There’s just something magical about reading and writing while the snow is softly falling outside. The beauty of the season can be the inspiration for your students to practice writing about details in the setting of a story.
Most young writers are not focused on story settings when they write. They want to describe the action, not the setting. It can be hard sometimes to get them to slow down, really think about the setting of their writing, and use the correct adjectives to describe it.
Using winter as a setting can really help your students practice their descriptions. There are so many adjectives describing snow, the scenery, and the activities. Here’s an idea for a lesson to practice descriptive writing.
Descriptive Writing Lesson Using a Winter Setting
The first thing to do is to help your students to visualize the type of scene you’d like them to write about. Show them a picture or read a story showing a winter setting. This is especially important if you live in an area without a “typical” winter.
A scene like this might help inspire some winter writing!
Explain to students why writers need to “show” the setting to their readers. They need to have a clear picture in their mind to describe it to their readers so that they can visualize it also.
See what questions your group can generate about the setting. Or start by modeling the questions they might ask themselves. What scents do I notice? How does it feel like there? What colors do I see? Who made the tracks in the snow? Where are the tracks leading? If they have trouble thinking up their own questions about a picture, tell them to start with the 5 senses.
Now have your students answer the questions. You can create a list on a whiteboard or easel. If you’re teaching this lesson independently or in small groups, have them brainstorm a list of words that can answer the questions.
The trickiest part for most students is the next step. They’ll need to take those answers and turn them into complete sentences. Model this skill by showing them how to do one or two. Or you can provide them with sentence starters.
Once students have their sentences done, they can write their descriptive setting. Have them revise and edit the way you normally would.
Of course, you don’t have to use winter scenes to teach this lesson! Any picture or story can be used. But winter has a beauty all its own.
This earlier blog post has other ideas and resources for seasonal writing prompts.
A Resource for Descriptive Winter Writing
If you’re looking for other sources to teach descriptive writing, my Winter Writing Prompts may be just what you need!
This inclusive resource has 10 photo pictures and 10 winter drawings for a wide variety of fun topics to write about. Each page includes a winter picture that can be colored or a winter photograph, a word bank with related words and a writing prompt. These winter picture writing prompts will also help students develop new vocabulary and work on extending sentences with adjective such as using color words to describe.
These are easy to differentiate, with alternative handwriting lines. There’s also a second page with a border for students who would like to write longer stories.
Have you tried other methods for teaching descriptive writing? We’d love to hear about them!
Here are some other seasonal writing resources.
