February 16, 2013

This week has been a writing marathon, or so it seemed. To start the week, and to get ready for Valentine's Day, we used Cara Carroll's Love, Splat writing idea. After reading the book, students wrote about when they feel loved, and then made their own Splat character. We think they are adorable. You can find this idea at her Teachers Pay Teachers store. Here's the link: Love, Splat

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

We are now in the process of publishing! Instead of publishing their reports in traditional paragraph form, we wanted the students to apply what they have learned about nonfiction text features. We used Pages Newsletters and let students add their favorite nonfiction text features. Some highlighted important words, some used headings, and some added captions to their pictures and maps. Only a few are finished with this project because they are so engaged with this lesson, they don't want to stop and be finished! Here are two finished reports. We'll share more next week.

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