Once that was finished, we went back to working on our animal reports. The students had been writing the body of theirs reports. They focused on adding details, voice, and fluent sentences to their writing. They've come along way since September. We were very impressed that they could take their notes and turn them into interesting texts.
The last part of writing these reports was to add the lead. We know from experience that writing the lead is one of the most challenging parts of this type of writing. Therefore, to support our students, we taught this skill through mini-lessons. After practicing this skill they added leads to their reports. The mini-lessons involved explicitly teaching them four types of leads: Single Word, Listen-Up, I Wonder, and Imagine That. These leads were taken from Ruth Culham's book, 6+1 Traits of Writing. To make this abstract skill more concrete, we used a picture of a lion and created an example of each lead to go with the picture. Then, we gave groups of students pictures of frogs and asked them to work together to create one of each type of lead. We shared some of their leads and charted them. This chart hangs in the room for students to refer to during Writing Workshop. They relied on these models when writing the lead to their animal reports. As a follow-up to this mini-lesson, we then gave students a picture with the four different types of leads. They had to identify what type of lead each one was.
Here are some of our students' leads from their animal reports:
Single Word Lead |
I Wonder Lead |
Imagine That Lead |
To wrap things up this week, we wanted to share our finished Meaningful Quotes from Anansi project. Success, finally!!! Here is the link to our Anansi lesson plan.Teachers Pay Teachers
Have a great long weekend! We hope you can use some of our ideas.
Kim and Anne
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