As promised, I wanted to share what we've been doing in our classroom with the Thanksgiving Persuasive Writing pack that you can learn more about HERE!
Since persuasive writing is now a big deal in the new Common Core standards, I put this writing activity together to make it fun and inspire my kids to be creative. Here is a step-by-step guide to show how I taught this in my classroom.
1.) Planning/Prep: Before I started the lesson, I put together these anchor charts that include the posters from my Thanksgiving Persuasive Writing Pack (see below) and printed out the writing and planning pages for the writing activity.
2.) Introduction/Define Core Concepts: We talked about what it means to persuade and discussed the various persuasion techniques are used to convince people to go out and "do something." Since we are starting off with logos (logic) for now, we then discussed debate and rebuttal. Students learned that defending their arguments against rebuttals often made their arguments much stronger.
Also as part of my introduction into the lesson, I read:
This might be the BEST book for an introduction to this unit EVER. It's a about a boy who is about to squish an ant, but before he can, the ant starts talking to him to persuade the boy not to squish him.
4.) Group Activity: We split students up into teams and had them come up with as many facts and logical responses as they could to support their positions. You can have the rest of the class listen to them and vote for a winner. They LOVED this!!!
5.) Individual Writing Activity: With the introduction and our first mini-lesson out of the way, my kids were SUPER eager to test their persuasive skills on me, using the prompts I created from my Thanksgiving Persuasive pack! I handed out their planning pages, and allowed them to start planning away to start persuading me with their first persuasive writing paper of the unit!
7.) Publishing: When it was time to create their published pieces, I had them write it on special publishing paper for the SUPER ADORABLE display in our hallway!
(There is ALWAYS time for super cute hallway displays)
Most of my kids chose the prompt about not eating turkey for Thanksgiving (surprise, surprise!), and I took an idea from Stephanie and Teaching in Room 6 and allowed them to "disguise" a turkey to help with their persuasion!
Here are just a few of my kids' HILARIOUS reasons, and I wish I would have taken more because these aren't even some of the BEST ones they came up with!
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| Oh dear me! This spelling needs some love :) |
Super adorable (although I do think he meant to write Medical Weight Loss calling YOU!)
Here are a few of their hilarious turkeys (please excuse the blur, they were taken on my I-Phone and didn't come out so great!!)
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| Do you LOVE his dreadlocks!?!!! |
For those of you that have purchased this, I have added the blank turkey template if you would like to add this fun twist to your students' writing! Just click HERE to re-download!
Stay tuned for more persuasive writing to come!! Ethos, pathos, testimonials, and slogans...OH MY!