Fifth grade students in descriptive writing classes are encouraged to increase their vocabularies in preparation for future grades. Descriptive writing provides students with an opportunity to increase their vocabularies during their writing processes. Grammatical rules are also addressed as students write and their descriptive pieces are corrected by educators. These are goals that fifth graders should meet through descriptive writing that will benefit them as they progress through school.
Because of an increase of the importance of technology in the world and in the United States, most schools are encouraged to teach students both the benefits of and how to use technology. Descriptive writing courses should teach students how to use computers and the Internet to find other descriptive pieces as well as information on how to write their own pieces. Students can also use word processing software to write, print and share their descriptive stories and essays.
Descriptive writing should show fifth graders how to think critically and how to use reasoning skills both in writing and in everyday situations. The process of writing descriptively requires and strengthens cognitive skills and allows students to tap into both their creativity and their logic. Students should seek out and identify details in stories that uphold or defy logic and should be able to spot such things in their own work as well.
Perhaps above all else, fifth graders should learn the rhetoric that goes along with descriptive writing. They should understand imagery, personification, simile, metaphor, scene, summary and other significant literary terms. They should be able to identify rhetoric in other descriptive pieces and in their own. They should also begin to find their own writing styles. Through descriptive writing, they should be able to express themselves using sensory details.