The teacher begins the writing assignment by asking each student to identify one memorable activity -- positive or negative -- that occurred in the student's life. They should choose a personal, memorable experience that sticks out in their minds, rather than something they merely observed, such as giving birth, the loss of a loved one, the first day of college or their first love. Students should pick a moment they can easily describe in great detail.
Students should include sensory information in their writing assignments, rather than just a list of facts, to allow their readers to experience the author's magnified moment from the author's words. To do this, writers should picture the significant moment in slow motion, and describe it frame by frame. Drawing a cluster web, including a single sensory moment in each of several circles, then connecting the circles with details. Students should use as many of the five senses -- touch, hearing, smell, taste and sight -- as possible and include the time, place and date of the event. If some students do not understand the assignment, the teacher can list an example from a volunteer on the board, writing down the student's magnified moment, then the setting and the applicable sensory images as they apply to the student's experience.
Teachers should emphasize to students to "show, don't tell" in their assignments. For example, instead of writing, "It was cold outside," change the thought to "I could feel the goose bumps on my skin as the air touched it." This allows readers to "see" in their minds what happened to the author during the significant moment and infer that it was cold outside. The students also should explain why they chose a particular event as memorable.
Students likely will revise their writing a few times, with encouragement from the teacher that making such changes -- correcting repetitious vocabulary, insufficient details, lack of clarity, as well as grammar and spelling errors -- improves their writing. Conversely, they must avoid too much description, which could cause their writing to become slow-paced and dull.