Teach Students to Write Descriptive Sentences

Are you constantly reminding your students to make their sentences more descriptive? Help your students craft more detailed and interesting sentences with our Stretchy Sentences Worksheet!

This worksheet is designed to help students break down the process of writing an interesting sentence into manageable steps. This resource guides students through the process of using the 5Ws (who, what, when, where and why) to create a rich, descriptive sentence. By brainstorming each component separately, students can focus on each detail that can be included to make their sentences more descriptive.

Here is an example of how the worksheet could be used to build a more comprehensive sentence:

• Yesterday… (when)
• Yesterday, my brother and I… (who)
• Yesterday, my brother and I walked… (what)
• Yesterday, my brother and I walked to the park… (where)
• Yesterday, my brother and I walked to the park to play on the swings. (why)

This worksheet fosters creativity by encouraging students to think about the details of their sentences, helping them learn to paint a picture with their words.

Use This Sentence Writing Worksheet with Your Students

This one-page worksheet may look deceptively simple, but you could quite easily build an entire sentence-writing lesson around it! Here’s how:

• Introduction to the 5Ws – Start the lesson by introducing the concepts of when, who, what, where and why. Discuss each element with the class, providing examples to show how these components work together to create a detailed sentence.
• Whole-Class Sentence Building – Project a copy of the worksheet onto your interactive whiteboard. As a class, brainstorm a topic idea for a sentence, then work together to build a sentence on that topic using each of the five components. Demonstrate how to combine these ideas into a single, detailed sentence.
• Independent Sentence Building – After the whole-class activity, allow the students to complete the worksheet independently. Encourage them to come up with their own topic idea for a sentence, complete the 5Ws, then join them together to form a descriptive sentence.
• Peer Sharing – Once the students have finished, have them share their sentences with a partner or small group. This can lead to discussions about what makes a sentence descriptive and interesting, as well as providing an opportunity for peer feedback.

Download This Sentence Writing Worksheet

This sentence writing worksheet downloads as a black-and-white PDF. Use the Download button above to access this file.

More Resources for Exploring Sentences

Looking for more teacher-created, curriculum-aligned resources to use when exploring sentence structure with your students? Teach Starter has you covered!

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Simple, Compound, and Complex Sentences PowerPoint

A 23-slide editable PowerPoint template that introduces simple, compound, and complex sentences.

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Four Types of Sentences Poster Collection - Primary and Intermediate

Display these posters highlighting the four types of sentences and teach your students to use varied sentence types in their writing.

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Complete and Incomplete Sentence Task Cards

These task cards are best used as independent practice or formative assessment assignments during sentence structure lessons.