Look Behind You!

One of my favourite tutoring lessons each week is an enrichment session with a Key Stage 3 student. In a short space of time, we’ve worked together to get him reading again, interested in writing, and enthused about English.

At the moment we’re working on descriptive writing, using an image of a futuristic city. We did the familiar ‘quadrant’ exercise: split the image into four and describe each part in far more detail than a cursory glance would give you.

One layer I’ve added in the past is a second ‘sweep’ over the image, adding details to each quadrant – not from what students see, but from what they imagine.

This time, I asked him to step back and tell me what might lie outside or beyond the frame.

Suddenly, we were hurtling down into a subterranean cave, exploring a black market that sold every product you could possibly imagine. He described it with tremendous creativity, from the holographic tablets that displayed the prices to the way taxes were collected.

It turned an already engaging description into something incredible!

What strategies do you use for descriptive writing from an image? I’d love to borrow a few.