Using your sense of sight, finish the following lists:

Color:

Purple Gray Brown Green Red

Orchid ashen almond celery cherry

Grape pearl tan avocado ruby

Appearance: Movement: Shapes:

Dotted skip tubular

Cracked dash wavy

Ragged scurry rectangular

Frayed lumber crooked

Hollow shuffle tapering

1. Write the following words on the board: a shoe, a leaf, bread, the sidewalk.

2. Explain that each is something that they might see every day. Ask student to choose one object, close their eyes and visualize a specific picture in their minds, and, finally, write several sentences, using the sense of sight, to create a picture that will be seen by the reader. Fore example, a piece of soap becomes "a gold bar of DIAL, oval and cracked. The letters look like an old tombstone inscription. It has fallen from the sink and rests in the cobwebs and sand behind the wastebasket.

3. Encourage students to use original detail. For example, the description of the bar of soap is so particular that it could have existed only in that exact moment in that very place.

List 10 sounds you would like to hear or 10 you wouldnít like to hear.

Topics: a pep rally, a hospital waiting room, an amusement park

Add more words to each category.

Crash buzz drawl

Thud snap murmur

Screech tinkle stammer

Topics: a pieced of cotton, a blanket, an ice cube, a sunburn.

Add more words

Cool, scalding, sticky, damp, slippery, waxy, rubbery, velvety, fuzzy

What is your favorite food? What tastes do you dislike? What are some different kinds of stores; describe how they smell. Can you think of a memory associated with a smell?

Topics: a blade of grass, a fire, a lemon drop, a piece of toast

Add more words

Taste: Oily, bitter, bland, peppery, sugary, raw, bitter, sweet,

Smell: fragrant, spicy, burnt, putrid, moldy, rancid, minty, fishy, sour

Keep copies of all your brainstormings so that you can use them later in the semester to help the student to write more interesting sentences and paragraphs.