Eager Essayists

The "snow" day made for an odd  first week back, but we made the most of our three days together and the students continued with their work writing personal essays.Up until this point  they have really only been focusing on writing strong paragraphs or longer informational writing pieces. Now they are being asked to write an opinion piece that includes not only five structured paragraphs, but also uses elaboration, details, and stories within to build an essay that includes voice and detail,

This is challenging stuff, so the way that we break it down is Liz teaches the lessons on structure and organization. We use a baking analogy to say that she is going to teach how to make their essay "look" good. Then Jess teaches the lessons on writer's craft; teaching them how to make it "taste" good, too.

We began the week by having students use prompts to write as much as they could about their opinion on the importance of homework. It was amazing to see how much more they could write with the help of phrases like:
Some people think...but I think....
As I write this I realize...
An example of this is...

Then the students went back in and mined through all of their writing to find a seed idea that they wanted to grow into a longer essay. To do this they asked themselves some questions about the big ideas that kept coming up in their writing...
What topics do I keep writing about?
Why is this piece so important? What could it teach my reader about me?

Once students had this seed idea they used it to think about they REALLY wanted to say about this topic. This took lots of wordsmithing until it sounded exactly the way they wanted it to sound. Here are some of our thesis statements that we will use to write longer personal essays:

Sports are an important part of my life.
My old house is where all of my memories began.
My dog has a great personality.
My father is a caring person.

Next week our essays will begin to take shape and develop into what will most likely be the strongest and most challenging writing pieces they have ever written.

We are also working on our Passion Projects during our theme time which combines reading, note taking, research, writing, and creating. We look forward to sharing our hard work with you at our Passion Project Presentation Breakfast on the morning of Tuesday, March 22.

Conferences will be held at the end of this month on several different days. Please click on your child's teacher's wiki signup on the side bar of the blog under important dates if you would like a conference for the spring.