• Describing a subject from different perspectives helps students to generate content.

• It can also help them to think about what an adjective does and to generate them in their own work. 

• Description bubbles can also be used to help students understand and begin to build different types of sentences and build up their writing into paragraphs. 

Simple Sentence Descriptions

• Begin by using the description bubbles to describe subjects from just one perspective at a time. This will build an understanding of what a simple, well-crafted sentence looks like. 

  • 1. E.g.,  Teacher: "Use a colour sentence." Student: "Cherries are red."

• Stretch students by getting them to include two or more perspectives in the same sentence so you can introduce a listing comma: "It has big, round  eyes." 

compound Sentence with multiple perspectives

• • Practice creating compound sentences by describing subjects from two or more perspectives in the same sentence. 

complex Sentences with multiple perspectives

• Encourage students to play with sentences by changing the order of clauses:

  • Bees will sting if you annoy them. 

  • If you annoy them, bees will sting. 

• Start descriptions using subordinating conjunctions to get students used writing interesting sentence openers:

  • Although the monster is huge, he's very gentle. 

• Practicing starting sentences with a subordinating conjunction will make it clearer to students how a subordinate clause provides extra details that aren't essential for the sentence to make sense. Subordinate clauses are "incomplete ideas"  that don't make sense on their own. 

• Creating descriptions using complex sentences them can also help students practice when to correctly use a comma, as they should only be used to join a complete and incomplete sentence. Whenever a sentence begins with a subordinating conjunction/clause, it must use a comma: 

  • Because the monster had long, sharp teeth, everybody was scared of him. 

VERYING SENTENCE TYPES: SIMPLE, COMPOUND, COMPLEX

• Encouraging students to vary their sentence types when using description bubbles can improve the flow and maturity of their writing, improving their use of expression.