Dirty Beards and Ugly Feet

We had an entertaining literacy session with lots of screwed up faces and disgusted children. We listened to and read the opening chapter of Roald Dahl's The Twits. Roald Dahl gives a grotty description of men with beards. We discussed strategies he used to get the disgust reaction from his readers. This included contrast, vocabulary, specific detail, and examples. The students then had a go at getting a disgust reaction by using these strategies in some of their own writing. Their prompt was the photo below of ugly feet.

Here are a few sentences pulled out from their descriptions:

Tabitha - Curling over and under, wrinkly and cracked, toes no one ever wants to come across. 

Kiran - He has abnormally long and crooked toes that don’t fit into his socks. So to solve that he cuts holes in his socks so all you see is his long mangled toes sticking out.

Cameron - Mr. Stout had warts mounted on every joint of his vile dried up toes. His repulsive rectangular toenails clung upon the sea of dry skin of which he called toes. ...Mr Stout never really seemed to mind just how beastly his feet were, but anyone who came near him would be greeted by a nauseating smell ...

Campbell -  If you look closely (Though I’m not sure you’d want to) then you can see things like dirt, dust, and dead insects jammed up her toenails. 

Jack K - He was no ordinary kid. His feet were rough, green, one toe folded in and another toe stuck out.