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