Writing Wednesday: Use Your Senses

My colleague and I wrapped up a super fun and rewarding kids writing program, and some of our activities went down such a treat I knew I had to share them! This exercise, which we used during our session on settings, could be used with writers of all ages – it’s a quick activity that can be slotted into a program as a bit of a breather, or used to stretch out a program.

It’s actually a riff on a classic mindfulness technique used to help ground people during moments of anxiety or stress. You simply use your senses to describe the immediate world around you, which (in theory anyway) can help bring you out of a spiral and ground you in the present moment.

In its original format you:

“5: Acknowledge FIVE things you see around you. It could be a pen, a spot on the ceiling, anything in your surroundings.

4: Acknowledge FOUR things you can touch around you. It could be your hair, a pillow, or the ground under your feet. 

3: Acknowledge THREE things you hear. This could be any external sound. If you can hear your belly rumbling that counts! Focus on things you can hear outside of your body.

2: Acknowledge TWO things you can smell. Maybe you are in your office and smell pencil, or maybe you are in your bedroom and smell a pillow. If you need to take a brief walk to find a scent you could smell soap in your bathroom, or nature outside.

1: Acknowledge ONE thing you can taste. What does the inside of your mouth taste like—gum, coffee, or the sandwich from lunch?”

Instead of asking kids to describe their immediate surroundings, we asked them to describe a place, whether real, imagined, or taken from a movie or book, using all 5 of their senses. Because our participants were all on the younger side, we kept things simple and encouraged them to find two answers for each sense, so two sights, two smells etc. We always encouraged kids to write more if they wanted to, but we also wanted to keep the exercise accessible across our mixed-aged group.

As an example, I described a jungle.

I could see tall trees and green leaves.

I could hear birds calling and monkeys hooting.

I could feel the heat and the rain.

I could smell the flowers and the soil.

I could taste fresh fruit and clean water from a stream.

I think the kids must have been hungry that day, because we got some very delicious food-themed settings, including a restaurant, a bakery, and a land made of candy! Yum!

For an added challenge, you could ask students to guess the settings their counterparts describe. This could be particularly fun/challenging if you asked them to describe fictional settings from books, movies or TV programs. The possibilities are almost endless!

I’m sad our writing program has wrapped up for the year, but I’m already looking forward to running more writing programs in the new year, and connecting with more imaginative, creative and enthusiastic young storytellers!