Persuasive Writing Essays

Photo Credit: http://goo.gl/NLP60t

I really love teaching writing and seeing how the students grow throughout the year. For our last genre, the students have been introduced to persuasive writing using researching to strengthen their arguments. The first guided lessons were from Lucy Calkins using the "Should chocolate milk be served in schools?" argument. When I grabbed the book I was amazed at the topic because it fits perfectly with our current unit of inquiry, health and wellness.

The kids took the concepts and ran with them using the research skills that they learned during the 1000 word exhibition research report the completed. The essays were really good and the students really included some great facts about nutrition and made wonderful connections to what we have been exploring in class.

Next, students got to choose their own persuasive research question and write an essay based on their interest. A few students knew just what they wanted to research, but others needed some guidance, so with a quick google search, we had 101+ persuasive essay topics. Check out the sites we found!

101 Persuasive EssayTopics
100 Persuasive Essay Topics

Then, once the kids were set with their questions, they began researching and found some great sites for conducting research on a variety of topics. Check those out below too!

procon.org- The Pros and Cons of Controversial Issues
debate.org

Hope this gets your kids brains flowing and helps you teach persuasive writing essays in your class!
 

Writing Myths: Resources and Videos

For our new unit, Where We Are in Place and Time, grade 5 is exploring how people learn about the past. We have already put the puzzle pieces together for what makes a civilization and are exploring how places change over time.

Central Idea: Historical evidence helps us connect today's way of life with the past. 

Lines of Inquiry:

• Processes involved in collecting, analyzing and validating evidence
• How people build upon previous understanding
• Ways in which our understanding of the past has evolved over time, and shapes the future. 

We are also looking into mythology and writing our own myths. To help us get some instruction on how to write myths we watched these two videos.

How To Write Myths
What Is A Myth?

After watching the videos, we began our pre-writing task. In table groups, the students wrote ideas about what we could write about to explain the natural world. Some of my favorites were "Why do snails have shells?" and "Why do hounds have long ears?" Next, we brainstormed words associated with the topic to go in a word box and then plotted out several story possibilities. Our next step this week will be to learn about different Gods and Goddesses so that we can build them into our myths.

I will let you know how they progress, but until then, here are some other websites that might be useful.

Characteristics of Myths
Creating Your Own Myth
Scholastic Writing With Writers: Jane Yolen
Greek and Roman Gods and Goddesses
Scholastic- Myths, Fairy Tales and Folktales
Write Your Own Myth
Myth Story Examples

Also, the Mythic Warriors series shows are great for learning about the Gods and Goddesses. Youtube has a ton to watch.

Show, Don't Tell

This past week we have been working on Show, Don't Tell in writing. It is a part of the Common Core State Standard W.5.3 and we have been looking at how to elaborate our writing. We examined this concept in connection to our reading concept of inference and how we use our schema and what is in the writing to put the pieces together to determine what the author is trying to tell us. I emphasized that an author has to assume that their reader is smart and instead of just telling them what is happening, they need to leave little story clues.

We took some basic tell sentences like "It was cold" and changed them to make them show sentences like "The chilled air was a frigid -8 degrees Celsius as I stepped out of the car and my feet crunched on the hard, crunchy earth." First we made a word box to brainstorm some words that related to the sentence and then we wrote some sentences to show the concept.

Here are two student paragraphs to Show, Don't Tell. 

Patriks:

My friend is a joker

that makes me laugh till

crying and feel like I can’t breathe. Also when

I look at him he looks

like a legendary comedian

and like a flying banana

that will keep flying, flying

and flying to heaven. He will always have a joke

whenever I go to school and whenever

he goes to school. I also think he gets paid for making jokes.

Klaudija:

She is kind and caring all day long. She cheers when she knows that we are going to lose. Every day I get a present from her. She is helpful and very happy too. We smile play and draw. She is a perfect friend.


 

Visiting Author: Marc Tyler Nobleman

Thanks to our lovely librarian, Ms. Karen Choan, we had a wonderful visiting author from the US. Marc Tyler Nobleman spent 4 days with IST presenting and leading workshops for students. It was an amazing experience and something we were lucky to have.

On Monday, Marc Tyler Nobleman discussed his two biographies about authors who created Superman and Batman. The students were engaged in the topic and were fascinated by the information he presented.

 Here is an image of the first comic ever and below is the high school photo of Milton "Bill" Finger, one of the creators of Batman.

 It turns out that Bill Finger's ashes were spread on the coast of Oregon, my home state. What a coincidence. It was interesting to hear of the connection, especially being in Tanzania.

Later on in the week, Marc had my kids in the library for a workshop on creating comics. He presented about the language of comics and how they are used to convey a story with both the words and pictures. He also gave some pointers on creating comics. It was a great session and afterwards, many of the students chose to create comics of their own.

Thanks so much to Marc and Karen for organizing such a wonderful series of events for IST's Writing Week! We loved it!

Published Procedural Writing Projects

 It is no secret that I "heart" technology and I try to pass my love along to my students in numerous ways. I share their work on our blogs, use games and resources to teach, have "Video Friday", conduct real time research and inquiry with the internet, and utilize my wonderful Smart Board daily, just to name a few.

This year was the first year I tried using iMovie, not only myself, but with my students. We created projects showing their procedural writing pieces. Take a look at some of these wonderful How-To videos and pay attention to the sequence of step, wonderful details and use of transition words!

Carter wrote about How-To Surf...

 Grace wrote about How-To Sing...

Mimi wrote about How-To Play Every Sport...

Ville taught us How-To Make Pizza

Piya taught us How-To Swim

Sania taught us How-To Make a Mango Smoothie

 P.S. I can't wait to use iMovie with my students some time soon!

Similes Make Us Smile!

We have begun a unit on poetry and poetic language. Last week we studied alliteration and this week we are learning about and starting to use similes. A simile is a figure of speech that compares two things that are not normally alike using the words like or as. The kids came up with some great ones. Here are a few of my favorites.

Carter-Miss Irene is as lovely as a rose getting smelled by me.
Keenan- My puppy Max is as cute as a bunny running down a hill.
Grace- My friend Jay is as cool as a kitten riding a skateboard.
Piya- Cake is as sweet as a 10 pound sugar rush.
Anisa- Green broccoli is as juicy as an ice-lolly in summer.


And some personal favorites ;-)

Mustafa- My teacher, Miss Rorey, is as cute as a monkey.
Ella- My teacher, Miss Rorey, is as lovely as a bird singing to me.
Mimi- Miss Rorey is as pretty as a rose that just bloomed.


 

Informational Writing: Kids News Websites

 The final writing unit of this year for grade 3 is Informational Reports. Students are researching and
writing reports related to our PYP Plant Unit. Here are some websites for kids that have many examples of non-fiction writing. Kids, take a look through them and see if you can get any tips for your writing. Enjoy!

National Geographic Kids
Scholastic News Online
Science News for Kids
Time for Kids
 

Cinquain Poetry

This week we began our poetry unit. We wrote acrostic poems, practice alliteration, reviewed the importance of using carefully chosen words and wrote cinquain poems. Here are a few of our student poems from this week.

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Television

Voice, wordy

Playing, singing, watching

Good to watch television

Loud

By Ally

Friends
Kind, honest
Caring, committed, accepting
Friends are friends and they never break up
B.F.F.!

By Maya

 

Writer's Celebration!

This past Monday we had our Writer's Celebration. This was an idea that my fellow team member, Lara, brought to us from Grade 2. She did it last year and it was such a success that we wanted to do it in Grade 3. We were all for it!

About two weeks before the big day, students looked in their writing journals and chose a piece that they wanted to revise, edit and publish. We discussed how it had to be a piece that they really liked because they were going to be working on it for two straight weeks. Once the piece was chosen, they copied it, double spaced, onto a sheet of paper so that it would be easy to make changes to. Then I assigned writing partners and together, we worked through may mini-lessons on various steps of the revising, editing and publishing process. Lara provided us with a list of lessons from a Lucy Calkins resource she had and I added a few mini-lessons of my own from our Write Source materials.

These mini-lessons included:

• revising the ending
• writing an interesting lead
• rereading to make sure your story makes sense
• including dialogue in your story
• adding similes
• adding interesting words
• omitting extraneous details
• adding transition words
• using the 5 senses to make the story come alive
• editing for capitals, organization, punctuation and spelling (we like to call it "Call the C.O.P.S.")
• publishing in a polished format
• adding a full page illustration

It was a wonderful morning and it was so nice to see so many family members listening and learning about the writing process from their child. We even had the vice-principal and the librarian in to visit and see all of the progress. The kids did such a great job! 

Writing Wednesdays! Persuasive Writing

From now until December we will be working in the genre of persuasive writing. I introduced the genre by reading two picture books to the students. The first one is Hey, Little Ant. The books takes the reader through a conversation between a boy and an ant. The boy sees the ant and wants to squish him with his shoe. The ant tries to convince the boy that he should not squish him. It is a cute, creative rhyming book that invites the reader, at the end of the story, to decide if the boy should squish the ant.

The kids were convinced that the new genre was poetry with the rhyming words so I had to read another one. I had two other books with me on my reading chair, Don't Let the Pigeon Drive The Bus and Earrings! I had to make a quick decision and since I love, love, love earrings, it was an easy choice. The second story Earrings! is about a little girl who is trying to convince her parents to get her ears pierced. She has some very good arguments and there is lots of expression in the writing.

After both stories, the kids got into small groups and discussed the similarities between the two books. Many great thoughts were generated and the class was able to list some of the key concepts of persuasive writing including an making an argument and getting someone to give you something you want.

Next we picked up the Write Source text book and read about persuasive writing. The kids were so excited to get started with this type of writing. We brainstormed a list of topics (writing trait: ideas) and made a list of possibilities. Stay tuned for more persuasive writing ideas in the upcoming weeks....

... and if you want more resources, check these links out!
A Quick Guide To Teaching Persuasive Writing, K-2
Persuasion Map
Write Persuasively (Grades 3-5)
Can You Convince Me? Developing Persuasive Writers
Persuasive Writing Pinterest Page (Ms. Rorey Hearts Pinterest)
Persuasive Writing from a fellow Teacher Blogger
Student Writing Models (from Write Source)
Edutopia Article: Persuasive Writing is a Key Focus in Common Core Standards
 

Grade 5 Assembly!

Students in 3R were given a choice of writing topics today during Period 2- Writing. One of my students, Yuna, took the time to write about the Grade 5 Assembly. This is an independent action that I wanted to share with the IST community.

The Grade 5 Assembly

 

We walked as a class to the assembly. I was excited because my brother was in it and because it was about Mikumi. After the assembly I felt happy for the kids because they earned books, T-shirts and toys so they could enjoy them as much as we enjoy them.  It was a very interesting assembly, but that's not all.

 

They had nice and interesting costumes like a camera, binoculars, monkey costumes and lion costumes too. The grade 5s were really risk-takers. What I mean with risk-takers is they stood up for themselves. This was one of the funniest and best assemblies.

 

Now, as the teacher I have to not only have pride that she wrote about the assembly, but that she also used many concepts in her writing that we have been teaching in class. These include: details and interesting words, transition words in time ordered writing, using commas in a list of items and the PYP attributes. Way to go Yuna. You made your teacher proud!

Writing: Teaching Voice

At IST we use 6-Traits Writing. This year we have already covered concepts in 5 of the writing traits (the easier ones,) but grade 3 is the first time we teach and asses the concept of "voice" and I still had not introduced this skill. This is a difficult concept for children to understand and master in their writing so I wracked my brain to come up with a fun way to teach it.

During planning a few weeks ago, I thought of an exciting way to teach "voice" using character cards (cards with different story characters printed on them.) The focus concepts were:

• using describing words to tell about a character
•  using dialogue with proper use of quotation marks
• different words for the word said 
• adding "voice" to stories

I chose a character card and out it up on my Smartboard using my document camera. The students and I then put describing words around the character to give them an identity. After that, we wrote 3 sentences using dialogue for what this character would say in a story. After I modeled for them and we did the task together, the students got to draw a character of their own, create describing words for that character, write dialogue for them and then create a story about their character. We used the printable below to complete this task. It turned out to be a successful introduction to the concept of writing with "voice."

 

Friendly Letter Writing

This week our writing focus was on creating friendly letters. On Tuesday I introduced the components of a friendly letter and shared with the students how to compose a letter with all of the necessary parts. 

We drafted letters to a person of our choosing and the students came up with many interesting topics to share about what was happening in their day to day life.

The following day, I gave an assignment to the students today to write a letter to someone different and many chose Roald Dahl, since we are doing a focus unit on his books. Other students chose people from the school or home setting and a few even wrote letters to imaginary characters. Here are some of the letters below:

Writing Focus: Expository Paragraphs

This past week, to correspond with the introduction of our new unit about water, the students began learning about expository writing. This type of writing provides answers to questions about the world. The main purpose of expository writing is to explain and inform the reader.

The most important of the 6 writing traits to teach during this genre are ideas and word choice. I wanted to share some activities you could do at home to practice these traits. Here are three ideas from our Write Source curriculum to help your child start thinking about expository text:

• Invite each family member to show and explain a skill or trick that requires at least three steps. Use the terms such as first, next, and then to help organize the concepts being explained.
• While waiting in line or traveling in a car call out a general noun such as pet, insect, sport, food, movie, book or plant. Ask your child to name specific nouns that fit into that category. Then switch roles. I still play this on road trips as an adult. We call the game “categories”  and you can get really creative with the topics you choose.
• At meal time, ask each family member to name two objects that are important to them and explain why they are important. Have the family vote on the item that would make a more interesting writing topic.

Enjoy!
Ms. Rorey