The next step in our Informational Writing has lead us to researching and finding out more on our migration subtopics. To help us when we find interesting or meaningful articles, websites, and books to aid our research, we took two days to really dive into quotes, paraphrasing, and summarizing as 3 tools to avoid plagiarism and give credit to the hard work of others. More specifically, we broke down paraphrasing into 3 steps and did our best to practice both orally and in our writing. It is a tough skill! They even quizzed me by reading 2 sentences from an article and had me try to paraphrase it into one! Hopefully we can plant some strong researching skills to help them navigate and learn effectively and efficiently around a topic of choice!
After getting excited about Salmon on our recent field trip, we are now tying our Informational Writing unit to our migration PBL! Upon selecting up to 3 salmon subtopics, we are beginning to plan, write and eventually create a book or brochure as a salmon migration expert! The first few steps involve the many different ways we can plan and organize our writing into subtopics, using an outline, cause and effect chart, pro and con chart, or mind map. My personal favorite is the mind map as it shows how different subtopics and ideas can be interconnected! Next steps will be writing a hook to grab the reader's attention using questions, visualization, an interesting fact, or perhaps a letter to the reader! Crafting our HOOK! Grabbing the Reader's Attention!After organizing and planning our Informational Writing and subtopics, we gathered a small library of nonfiction mentor texts to help us examine how author's write an intro that is interesting and makes you want to read more. Upon noting down these strategies, we sought to write the intro to our book using one or more of such strategies!
In Writing, we have begun to fill our Writing Journals with short true stories about our lives, inspired by many different things and people. While using Marshfield Dreams by Ralph Fletcher as a mentor text, we have explored what types of things we might put in our journal and how to write meaningful stories that answer the question: Who am I? This past Friday you may have heard that I requested that everyone bring in a meaningful artifact from their life. We then practiced describing the artifact using clear details, so that the audience may picture it in their head. The next half of our writing was about how the object was meaningful to us and what the story is behind it. It was a lot of fun sharing out our artifacts with each other and I am excited to continue to practice and apply detailed writing in our Journals!
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