Opinion Writing

Happy Saturday!  We are just finishing up our unit on opinion writing in Writer’s Workshop this week, and the kids are really getting into it. They love talking about their feelings on a topic with me and their friends. We like listening to all the different likes, dislikes, and feelings about things. We learned about how the magic word *because* is important in Q & A, or opinion writing, because it allows us to give  a supporting detail or 2 to back up our opinion.

I sent a parent questionnaire home for the parents to work on, and gave them a few questions to answer.  This turned out to be a great segway into our lesson each day– choosing one or two parent responses to read.
Then we followed up by choosing a question from our ultra-popular “Question Jar”

and using that for the discussion and writing prompt for the day. I liked using questions that would provoke thinking, and lead to some discussion. And, importantly, it was okay to say no, that you don’t like something….as long as you can give a supporting reason why!  No, I don’t like getting up in the morning. And that’s okay! I don’t like getting up in the morning because I usually go to bed much later than I should, and I am SO tired when my alarm goes off. (Could you tell by my answer that we are also working on restating the question in our answer? Intermediate stuff here folks!)

By Friday we will be ready for our unit post-assessment and I am confident that I will be reading a lot of nice, thorough opinions. 🙂  Teachers, you can download my question jar label, *because* labels, and writing prompts here on google docs.