Resources

by Linda Morel

Genre(s): Fiction and Non Fiction

Grades: 2, 3, 4, and 5

Student needs: Gen Ed and Gifted & Talented

Common Core Learning Standards: (3) Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique and well chosen details.

Workshop Objective: Scene setting. Students learn to take description of a place to the next level by setting a scene. Students learn how location of a story is integral to its narrative, often driving the narrative.

Guiding Questions:

What is a setting?

Why are descriptive details appealing to the five senses important in building a setting?

How does setting influence a story?

What happens if you change the location a story? Will the plot of the story have to change too?

Lesson:

Start with a review: A good description of a place appeals to as many of the five senses as possible.

Now we are going to build on our previous work in which we developed strong, sensory descriptions of a place.  These descriptions will now become the setting of a story.

Who knows what the setting of a story is?

Setting is important. What if The Night Before Christmas took place in Florida?  Santa wouldn’t even be able to wear a snow suit or drive a sleigh.

Read an excerpt from “The Rockpile,” asking students to listen for descriptive detail.

Excerpt from “The Rockpile” by James Baldwin:

Across the street from their house, in an empty lot between two houses, stood the rockpile. It was a strange place to find a mass of natural rock jutting out of the ground; and someone, probably Aunt Florence, had once told them that the rock was there and could not be taken away because without it the subway cars underground would fly apart. This was far too intriguing an explanation to be challenged, and it invested the rockpile with such mysterious importance that Roy felt it to be his right to play there….

Other boys were seen there each afternoon after school and all day Saturday and Sunday. They fought on the rockpile. Sure footed, dangerous, and reckless, they rushed each other and grappled on the heights, sometimes disappearing down the other side in a confusion of dust and screams and flying feet….

“It’s a wonder they don’t kill themselves,” their mother said. “You children stay away from there, do you hear me?”

But one Saturday,Roy was wounded on the rockpile and brought upstairs screaming.

Ask students what we learned about the rockpile. Which parts of the excerpt entail the description/setting and which parts become the story growing out of the description?

Ask for volunteers. Where did your description take place? Tell me how a story could grow from there. It could be from real life or make believe. 

If your living room is noisy from the TV and children playing, maybe you could wave a wand and lower the volume.

Write a story that grows out of sensory description of place.

At the end of the period, ask students to read their stories aloud.

Linda Morel is a nonfiction writer and T&W teaching artist.  You can read more about Linda here.

For a sample of student writing that came out of this exercise, go here.  Continue to check out our tumblr page at teachersandwriters.tumblr.com for more student writing from Linda's residency, as well as other student writing from other T&W writers' residencies, too!