Writing Workshop

Writing about Reading:  FINAL UNIT IN WRITING

Overview of Unit: 
Students will begin this unit writing letters - work that will be familiar to those who participated in the kindergarten opinion writing unit on persuasive letters. Across the first bend of this unit, students will draft letters about the characters they’ve met in their books, formulating opinions and supporting their ideas, providing reasons, and using details and examples from the test to support their claims.

In Topic 1 (Bend 1) - Helps students not only develop opinions about their reading, but to get
energy for writing. They will learn to state opinions clearly, retell their stories so that their
opinions make sense to readers, and revise their letters before sending them out into the world.

In Topic 2 (Bend 2) - Students will focus on raising the level of their letter writing.
To the untrained eye, there may be portions of this bend where the writing workshop
looks strikingly similar to the reading workshop in that students will be learning to read and
reread closely to come up with more ideas for opinions, more details and evidence to support
their opinions, as well as fun conventions that authors and illustrators use to fancy up and make
their writing interesting. Before students send their letters into the world, they will also
participate in a punctuation inquiry and then work to incorporate the conventions that they are
noticing in published books into their own writing.

In Topic 3 (Bend 3)- Students will shift gears, moving away from persuasive letters into more of
an essay format as they write to persuade others that their favorite books are worthy of
awards. This work will build on the first two bends as students continue to write their opinions
about books and support those opinions with reasons and details from the text. However, now
they will lift the level of this writing as they learn to incorporate quotations to supply further text
evidence, make comparisons between books and across collections of books, as well as add
introductions and conclusions, all in the service of teaching and persuading others.