One of the things we always strive for in writing is for our words to paint a picture for the reader. We want them to be able to envision the images we create with our adjectives and descriptions. With Halloween occurring last week, it gave us the perfect opportunity to practice our descriptive writing in a fun and collaborative way.

Students had to create their own monsters. Then, using their drawings, they had to write a description of their monster using as much detail as possible. This is so important to do in writing all the time but we also had another reason why we wanted to for this project as well.

For this particular project, we were going to switch our writings with Mr. Salsich’s class in Connecticut. The students were then going to have to use our writing to try to draw our monsters. We wanted them to be able to “picture” our monsters based upon our descriptions in our writing. We also had to try to draw their monsters based upon writings that they had done. Once both classes were finished, we skyped so that we could share see their versions of our monsters and show them what we imagined they actually looked like!

Sharing our monsters



Skyping with Mr. Salsich's Class


We saw a lot of similarities between our monsters and the ones Mr. Salsich’s class drew. In order for that to happen, we definitely had to use a lot of detail! Take a look at our slideshow below. You can read our descriptions, see our monsters, and then see the monsters that Mr. Salsich’s class drew based on our writing.


*Do you think you could have drawn the monsters based on the descriptions?*

*After reading the descriptions, did the monsters look how you imagined they would?*