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Seminar: Self Assessment - Building Student Capacity in Writing

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Peer Edit With Perfection: Effective Strategies - ReadWriteThink

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Do students' eyes glaze over when they try to edit their own writing? Give them a fresh perspective with peer editing. Students are introduced to a three-step strategy for peer editing, providing (1) compliments, (2) suggestions, and (3) corrections in response to a sample of student writing.

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Argument Essay Ideas Synthesis Essay Topics Topic Writing Essay within Persuasive Essay Graphic Organizer With Counter-Argument

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Persuasive Essay Graphic Organizer With Counter-Argument " Argument Essay Ideas Synthesis Essay Topics Topic Writing Essay within Persuasive Essay Graphic Organizer With Counter-Argument

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"The Best Pet" Common Core Opinion Writing Unit

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"THE BEST PET" COMMON CORE OPINION WRITING UNIT - TeachersPayTeachers.com

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| | Filed Under: Writing & Grammar

Persuasive writing is one of my favorite writing genres to teach. The students get so excited about the different topics and love debating and supporting their arguments and claims. On this post, I will share some of my students' favorite persuasive writing prompts with a free download of a printable list and task card version of the writing prompts.

Student-Approved Persuasive Writing Prompts

The list below (available as a free download at the end of this post) contains a variety of engaging persuasive writing prompts and topics that students will enjoy researching, debating, and writing about.

As you will see, the writing topics are varied as our students are often varied in their interests. However, these topics are ones that most students enjoy debating and writing about. Some lend themselves to research-based persuasive writing and some are more opinion-based.

1. Should children be paid for good grades?

2. Should fidget spinners be allowed in classrooms?

3. Are professional athletes overpaid?

4. Should cell phones be allowed in classrooms?

5. Is bottled water or tap water better?

6. Do children need strict bedtimes?

7. Should we resurrect extinct species via cloning?

8. Should schools be year round?

9. Should students have homework?

10. Should students be required to wear uniforms?

11. Should students be required to learn cursive?

12. Should girls and boys play competitive sports against each other?

13. Should Columbus Day be removed as a holiday?

14. Are white lies okay?

15. Are zoos beneficial or harmful for animals?

16. Should animal testing be banned?

17. Should school lunches be free for all students?

18. Should we move to driverless cars in the near future?

19. Should screen time be limited for children?

20. Should we keep the penny as a unit of currency?

21. Should all forms of sugar be eliminated from school lunch options?

22. Should pets be allowed in school?

23. Are reusable or recyclable bottles better?

24. Should textbooks be replaced with tablets in schools?

25. Should schools have sports?

26. Should school buses be discontinued?

27. Do classrooms have too much unneeded technology?

28. Should schools be funded with taxpayer money?

29. Should children be paid for chores?

30. Should schools have extended or multiple recesses?

31. Should school weeks be shorter?

32. Should animals be illegal to have in circuses?

33. Do video game sports count as actual sports?

34. Should chocolate milk be served in school cafeterias?

35. Should junk food and candy be banned in schools?

36. Is graffiti an expression of art or vandalism?

37. Should gum be allowed in classrooms?

38. If you find $100, is it yours to keep?

39. Should schools have dress codes?

40. Are earbuds or headphones better for children?

41. If you find a historical treasure, does it belong to you?

42. Should college athletes be paid?

43. Should schools or classrooms be separated by gender?

44. Should students be able to choose their seats?

45. Should people be allowed to go barefoot anywhere they want?

46. Should students get paid for attending school?

47. Should skateboarding be banned in public places?

48. Is space exploration worth the money we spend on it?

Using the Persuasive Prompts

Here are some ideas for using these persuasive writing prompts in your classroom:

Use the list format as a teacher-guide when choosing engaging persuasive writing topics for your students.

Use the prompts at a writing center or station.

Allow students to choose from the list topics that interest them.

Use the writing prompts as early finisher options...Need more early finisher ideas? Click here.

Use these in conjunction with research. Allow the students to choose a topic (or assign a topic) with two clear sides to debate, have them research facts and information to support both sides of the debate, then have them choose the one to write about, bringing in facts from their research to support their opinion or claim.

Click here or on the image to download the persuasive writing prompts in list format and task card format.
Download the Persuasive Writing Prompts
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Engaging Persuasive Writing Prompts (Free Download) -

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Filed Under: Writing & Grammar Persuasive writing is one of my favorite writing genres to teach. The students get so excited about the different topics and love debating and supporting their arguments and claims. On this post, I will share some of my students' favorite persuasive writing prompts with a free download of a printable list and task card version of the writing prompts.

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Free Printable Graphic Organizers for Opinion Writing by Genia Connell | 4th/5th grade finds | Pinterest | Opinion writing, Writing and Persuasive writing

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Free Printable Graphic Organizers for Opinion Writing by Genia Connell

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This Opinion Writing pack is perfect for kindergarten and first grade students.  There are over 30 ready to go writing prompts!

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Written expression is a huge part of life inside and outside the classroom. When students with disabilities learn to write, type, and/or select appropriate communicative responses, it opens the door to greater opportunities to reach their learning goals, communicate their preferences, and establish rapport with the people around them.

Today's post shares 7 important steps to consider when designing programs for teaching written expression to students with disabilities. These are excerpted and adapted from the excellent guidebook More Language Arts, Math, and Science for Students with Severe Disabilities, edited by Diane M. Browder and Fred Spooner.

Assess Students' Current Repertoire

Which words and communicative responses does the student already use? Before you select a student's instructional targets, start by determining his or her current writing and communication repertoires through formal and standardized assessments. An assessment of communicative functioning should target:

Speaker skills, or expressive skills: communication skills that affect the behaviors of others

Listener skills, or receptive skills: communication skills that involve responding to the words of others

To help you easily determine instruction objectives, you might also use a curriculum-based assessment tool that uncovers information about a broad array of skills relevant to writing-such as a student's fine motor skills, communication, visual discrimination, and imitation.

Make Writing Meaningful

Focusing on the mechanics of writing will often prevent a student from understanding and accomplishing the purpose of writing. Think beyond the traditional ways students have learned to write, and focus on making writing meaningful.

Ask what's important and potentially reinforcing to students, and use the answers as engaging topics for written narratives. Try presenting pictures of characters from a book and asking the student, "Whom would you like to write about?" Let the student select their three most preferred characters to focus on during writing instruction.

Teach students to request desired objects by exchanging pre-written words for preferred items. For example, you might instruct a student to get a cookie by handing the written word cookie to a partner. Once the student masters this, he or she can be taught to combine the written words big and cookie to communicate a desire for a larger cookie. This is a powerful way to give students direct control over their environment as they learn the functional use of written words. As a bonus, it allows students to use pre-written words without having to learn more complex fine motor and cognitive skills first.

Deliver reinforcement right away. When your student displays any type of writing or prewriting behavior-holding a crayon, scribbling, pressing keys on a computer, drawing on a SMART Board-follow it up with immediate praise and reinforcement. This will hopefully increase the frequency of their writing behavior and improve the fine motor skills they need for handwriting or keyboarding.

Teach students how to copy words from labels, books, and other sources. Provide lists of words your students can copy from to increase their engagement in academics and leisure activities. For example, you can provide a list of words students can copy into search engines to access educational content for school (solar system, dinosaurs, U.S. presidents, etc.) and locate information on hobbies (computer games, stamps, scrapbooking). Once you teach students this skill, they can also use the print within their environment to develop their spelling proficiency. A student who can't remember how to spell the word "milk," for instance, can consult a milk carton for a model of the word.

When learning to copy words, some students may need assistive technology to circumvent weaknesses in fine motor skills. You may need to use adapted keyboards (alphabetical, onehanded, large print), AAC selection displays, and/or scanning technology for students who have physical disabilities that affect their gross and fine motor functioning.

Once students learn to copy other words, they can progress to spelling words after hearing them spoken. Try these strategies to boost emerging spelling skills:

Backward chaining strategy. Present the spoken word and then provide a written model for the student to trace. Fade the written model by incrementally removing the letters in the word from the last letter to the first.

Computer-assisted instruction. Show the student a word/picture combination, and then ask him to select letters from a computer-based array to construct the word shown.

Cover, copy, compare (CCC) technique. Give the student a piece of paper divided into four columns. The first column contains the targeted spelling word. The student copies the word and writes it in the second column. Then the student folds the first column on the left toward the center (covering the second column) and writes the word from memory in the third column. The student unfolds the paper and compares, and if she's made an error, she copies the word three times in the final column.

Video models. Record a video of yourself writing new words on a chalkboard, and display the video on a computer while students type or write the words. Insert a pause in the video to allow the student time to copy the word. Then insert a blank screen, during which the student writes the word from memory, and show the original model once more. (Share the videos with parents to help them support their child in practicing writing skills outside the classroom.)

Encourage Sentence Construction

Begin instruction by teaching students to write, type, or select words when presented with a picture or object.

Once students have acquired a small word-to-picture repertoire of about 50 words, start using sentence starters ("I see a _____," "The boy is ______") to expand the length of these responses.

Fade the sentence starters gradually so that students are independently constructing sentences.

Once students can write a single sentence about a picture, encourage them to write multiple sentences about a picture. Present pictures containing a variety of stimuli and highlight features of the picture to help students identify content in which to describe or label. These prompts can then be faded to ensure students can choose to write about the stimuli that they deem important.

Fade the use of pictures so that students can eventually write about things they have learned. Slowly increase the amount of time between the observation of the picture and the writing response. This fading is important, since students will rarely be asked to write about things immediately present in their environment.

Note: If students have not acquired sufficient spelling skills to write sentences, then they may require the use of selection-based writing software in which words or combinations of words are presented within arrays on a computer screen.
Teach Narrative Writing

Students who can engage in narrative writing are able to articulate what they know and share their perspective on the world around them. Carefully plan instructional activities to help students acquire narrative writing skills:

Begin by teaching students to write simple paragraphs. Show them that a paragraph names a topic and then tells more about that topic.

Teach students to apply this rule when writing a paragraph about a picture. Help the student to identify the content of a topic sentence by highlighting a key element within the picture.

Present a visual organizer and show the student how to use it during planning and while writing his or her paragraphs.

To give students a model for simple storytelling, show them a series of pictured events or video recordings of real-life events (e.g., child plays ball, child falls down, child cries). You might also give students a series of pictures to sequence themselves before they write a story.

Once students can write or construct a paragraph about a picture or other visual aid, fade the use of visual supports.

Provide Editing and Revision Instruction

You can help improve the quality and clarity of student writing by prompting them to check their own work. For example:

After teaching a student to write simple sentences, instruct the student to identify whether he or she has included both a person or a thing and something more about the subject.

Direct the student to look for ending punctuation.

Ask students to identify missing elements in their stories. Have them practice by presenting a variety of examples and having the student record the presence or absence of the elements.

Teach students to use checklists to increase the inclusion of critical elements during writing activities.

Show students how to graph their use of writing elements and monitor their own progress, so they can become more independent and effective writers.

Writing instruction for students with disabilities is a complex process that must be carefully and deliberately planned. These were just a few suggestions to get you started. For more guidance-and practical information on how to teach other academic content areas to students with developmental disabilities-check out More Language Arts, Math, and Science for Students with Severe Disabilities.

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7 Steps to Teaching Writing Skills to Students with Disabilities

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Written expression is a huge part of life inside and outside the classroom. When students with disabilities learn to write, type, and/or select appropriate communicative responses, it opens the door to greater opportunities to reach their learning goals, communicate their preferences, and establish rapport with the people around them.

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In my first year of teaching I was expected to use a writer's workshop model where students almost always chose their own writing topics. This was before the Common Core standards and my district wasn't very concerned about what genres students wrote in, as long as they wrote. I could definitely tell you that in my students' opinion, professional wrestling was the best sport and puppies were the best pet. I knew this because of the sheer volume of random writing I saw on these two topics, not because my students were skilled at writing opinion pieces.

***I made a chart of helpful sentence starters that's perfect for writing folders. Get yours for free HERE!***

Things have changed and whether or not kids like it, opinion writing is now a staple genre in kindergarten through 5th grade. The good news is, teaching opinion writing doesn't have to be like pulling teeth. Here are four opinion writing ideas that you can put in place right away:

Choose Topics That Fire Them Up!

When presenting topic choices for opinion writing, the key is to think about what gets kids fired up. What are they constantly complaining about? What makes them mad? What do they argue about? What do they annoyingly beg for? What are some things that affect them that they've never even thought of? Here's a list of ideas to consider:

-How much homework should kids be given?
-What should the lunchroom offer that it doesn't already?
-How much recess should kids have?
-Should kids wear school uniforms?
-How much allowance should kids get?
-Which cartoon is the funniest?
-Should kids be allowed to use cell phones at school?
-Which football/baseball/soccer team is the best?
-Which book should the school library buy/buy more of?
-What should the school add to the playground?
-What kind of field trip should the class take?
-Which school rule should be changed?
-What pet should the class get?
-What is the best restaurant in town?
-Is it better to be smart or to be nice?
-Who should be given more money, schools or the military?
-Would you rather vacation to a big city or to the wilderness?
-Is life easier for boys or for girls?
-What one book should every kid read?
-Nominate a classmate for an award. Why do they deserve it?
-Should kids get paid to do chores?
-How much screen time should kids be allowed to have?
-How often should kids take a bath/shower?
-What is one thing that should be free for everyone?
-Should kids have to memorize math facts?
-Is it more important to know how to write or to know how to type?
-Should kids get paid for good grades?
-What one place should everyone visit?

Give Them A Jump Start With Sentence Starters

Staring at a blank page is the hardest part of the writing process for both kids and adults. I have found that the secret sauce for getting kids started is to provide them with potential sentence starters. It's so much easier to fill in the blank than to start from scratch.

***Get your free sentence starter chart HERE!***

A chart like this is perfect to put in student writing notebooks for reference. Opinion writing pieces would use mostly sentences starters from the second and third column. Eventually students become more confident and creative and they can move away from scripted sentence starters but this is a great place to start. You will be amazed by how much more mature your students' writing sounds when they start to incorporate some of these sentence starters.

Create a "Payoff"

As adults, when we write there is always a purpose. We write the principal an email to convince her to send us to a conference, we write instructions for a homework assignment, we write a newsletter to parents about upcoming events. Some of us have cultivated a love for writing and will write a poem or a narrative for our own enjoyment. When students write it is frequently because we told them to. For some kids, pleasing the teacher is motivation enough but others do much better when they have more of a pay off for the hard work for putting their ideas to paper, editing, revising, and producing a final copy. There are a variety of ways to create this motivation:

Give them an authentic audience - Students can write to the principal about their opinion on a school issue, to their parents about their opinion on an issue to home, to the PTA on their opinion about how fundraising money should be spent, to a government official about their opinion on a community matter

Give them an engaging project - Just writing their final copy on a plain piece of paper may not be very motivating to students. Try mixing it up with different kinds of publishing projects.

Write a brochure. The one pictured below is about a favorite place to visit. Students enjoy looking at travel brochures as examples. They could also write brochures about a favorite book, their opinion about the best sport, and a wide variety of other topics.

Write reviews. As a class you can write a book review and post it on Amazon. Students get very excited to see their own work on the internet and they feel that they have contributed to something big. Students can also write reviews about movies or restaurants and create a class book. They're probably familiar with the idea of assigning a certain number of starts out of five. Students enjoy reading the work of their peers and will recognize many of the restaurants or movies in the reviews.

Write award nominations. Assign each student the name of another student in the class. Each writer thinks about what their assigned subject is good at and gives them an award for that trait or skill. They write about why the person deserves the award.

Give them a chance to share - At the dinner table when a parent asks their child, "What did you do at school today?" lots of kids will say, "Nothing." So when a parent reports back to you with something their child came home excited about, you know you've struck an important chord. One of those golden nuggets that kids will rave about at home is a special writing sharing time. At the end of each unit, throw a publishing party or a book launch. The details are simple. Each student gets a chance to share their best piece with the class. At the end there's a little something special. For me it was a toast using small cups of apple juice. Kids felt so grown up as we honored their hard work. You can take your own spin on it, invite the principal or other special guests, invite parents, maybe ask some kids to bring cookies. When kids are in the trenches of writing, remind them that their hard work is important because they will want something good to share with their classmates at the publishing party.

Connect Steps with Color-Coding

The Common Core standards require that students use an introduction, reasons, and a conclusion in their opinion writing. These multiple sections can feel long, confusing, and insurmountable to some students. I found a game changer especially for struggling writers - color coding. Color coding isn't just for reading groups and supply buckets. Use color coding to connect the dots from the genre structure, to your students' planning, to their drafts. The color coding takes away a lot of the confusion and helps students to see how a big paragraph of writing is just made up of bite-sized sentences that they can take-on.

At the top of the graphic I have laid out the main sections of the genre and given each section a color. Next you can see a planning graphic organizer where each section is outlined in the correct color. Finally, there is an example draft where the sentence for each section is underlined in the assigned color. To help your students take it one piece at a time, you can demonstrate how you would write your pink sentence, then have them write their pink sentence. Then you demonstrate your green sentence and have them write their green sentence. When students are ready to write more they can add a detail in the green and yellow sections. (More on color-coding in narrative writing here.)

Follow along on Pinterest for more writing ideas:

Follow Hannah @ The Classroom Key's board Literacy on Pinterest.

Author: Hannah Braun

http://www.theclassroomkey.com

Hannah Braun is a former teacher with 8 years of experience in the classroom and a master's degree in early childhood education. She designs engaging, organized classroom resources for 1st-3rd grade teachers.

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Get Students Excited about Opinion Writing with these 4 Ideas

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In my first year of teaching I was expected to use a writer's workshop model where students almost always chose their own writing topics. This was before the Common Core standards and my district wasn't very concerned about what genres students wrote in, as long as they wrote.

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Detailed and Structured Graphic Organizers

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Detailed and Structured Graphic Organizers

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Opinion Writing, Transitions, Sentence Starters/Stems ANY TOPIC, Valentine's Day

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Opinion Writing Sentence Starters/Frames & Graphic Organiz

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Show young writers how to create change with written words.

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This deliciously inspired opinion anchor chart can be used by students in grades 3–5 during writers workshop, or when developing an opinion for discussion or debate. To build out student writing, have them "double-stuff" their Oreos with extra "E" examples.

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Anchor chart inspiration for elementary teachers. Use my Not-So-Pinteresty Anchor Charts for Reading, Math, Grammar, and Writing to help you make anchor charts.