He began by asking the children to relax and close their eyes. He then walked them through some relaxation techniques. When they were nice and relaxed (still with eyes closed) he asked them to imagine an ice cream shop. He told them to look at all the amazing and delicious flavours in the ice cream shop. He asked them to imagine what flavour they might choose if they were able to buy any flavour from the ice cream shop. Then he slowly brought them back to the classroom where they opened their eyes.
He then introduced the only flavour ice cream in his ice cream shop - vanilla (ice creams were cardboard cut-outs). This was met with disappointed cries, as he had just tempted them with so many delicous flavours!
Then he wrote a basic verb (e.g. walk, said) on each vanilla scoop, comparing these words to the flavour of vanilla - "Just like vanilla these words are okay - but there are better, more flavourful words out there that could be used instead".
He handed each group a thesaurus and asked each group to come up with a list of words that were more descriptive than the vanilla word that their group was given. The list of words was then checked by the teacher. When the list was checked the students could choose coloured paper to make their scoop of ice cream and write their word on.
This resulted in about 8 words per ice cream cone which were then hung up and displayed in the room so that the students could later refer to these words when writing their narrative.
(Pictures to come!)