Informative writing

We began working on informative writing this week. We began with looking at our writing standard. First we broke it apart into different pieces and talked through the language of the standard. While we were discussing we were highlighting pieces of the standard on our smart board. We also discussed the difference between the fourth grade standard and the third grade standard. The students were able to notice several things such as the addition of using precise language and having headings in their papers.  After that we worked on locating pieces of our standard in a mentor text that we had previously worked with to focus on structure of a text (ri.5). After spending some time focusing on this we worked on transferring this new knowledge to our interactive notebooks. Then we began to make goals for ourselves based on the what area of the standard we need to work on. 

FAST Characteristics

One of the first standards that we are working on this year is RL.4.3 "Describe in depth a character drawing on specific details in a text (eg, thoughts words or actions). I pulled a resource from Pinterest from iheartliteracy. She had used this to teach characterization during independent work time. I worked towards them being able to do this independently.

First we started with last year's standard of being able to identify character traits inside and outside. We began this with interviewing our fellow classmates so that we are starting with something that everyone will be able to access. We discovered that is a lot easier to figure out what the outside of our classmate versus inside our classmate.  The next day we began to transfer our new knowledge to our new chart. We used Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing to begin to categorize our thoughts on the main character and his Feelings, Actions, Sayings, and Thoughts.

We worked on this whole group to help familiarize the students with the organizer. We gradually moved students from whole group, to partners, and eventually to independent work.

For the most part this was very successful. Students began to work on inferencing about how a character feels using information from their head and evidence from the text. When they were working independently they would notate where they were drawing inferences from by a I with a circle around it.

I still struggle with how to help students who are have trouble doing this work independently and how they can interact with the standard when they are reading well below grade level. I found Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing online, so that helped some.

This was a good sequence of lessons to give the students some practice in locating and determining details in text through inferencing as well as textual evidence, and being able to describe a character in depth.