WRITING UNIT OVERVIEWS: FIFTH GRADE



WRITING UNIT OVERVIEWS: FIFTH GRADE

Unit 1: Writing Stories That Matter

During the course of the school year, your reading and writing blocks will correspond with each other. While you are setting up your management for the reading workshop, you will also be setting up similar management and routines for the students during their writing workshop.

This unit begins with a quick publish that takes three days to complete. The “Quick Publish” gets students confident about writing by showing them that everyone can publish and do so in only three days. The main purpose of this part of the unit is for you to have a sample of your students’ writing abilities. You can see how their piece progressed from beginning to end, whether they are able to edit their own work, and check for features of good writing. Keep this (and all writing) in the students’ portfolios so they can see their progress at the end of the year.

Day One: Students can write about any topic they choose.

If they have a hard time thinking about a topic, suggest they write about part of their summer vacation or a letter to a friend. It doesn’t matter what topic they choose as long as they have something to write about. Allow them to write for 20 minutes (give or take 5 minutes depending on their focusing ability). Do not aid them.

Day Two: Edit previous day’s publication

Allow them to edit their piece any way they see fit. Tell them to check for spelling, punctuation, etc, but don’t help them with their work.

Day Three: Publication

Students recopy their edited piece in some way that shows publication (writing in pen, using fancy paper, etc.). Celebrate in a small way to recognize their first published pieces.

After the quick publish, students will be able to engage in the steps of the writing process. These steps are as outlined:

1. Gathering entries

2. Choosing an idea

3. Developing (growing) the idea

4. Drafting

5. Revising

6. Editing

7. Publishing

The mini-lessons described in this unit are a culmination of strategies that helps students to master the routines of the writing workshop, and begin collecting entries in their writing notebooks. Some schools are extremely particular about where writer’s notebooks are kept and the type of writing that goes in them, so make sure to model to the students how to use their writing materials.

Unit 2: Personal Narrative

The main goal of the personal narrative unit is for the students to write true stories that are focused chronologically, detailed, and written with clarity. You will also be referring to mentor texts, well-written published pieces that highlight the strategies you are teaching. These books will act as “mentors,” as you will refer back to them often as examples of “what to do.” Stories will be similar to the second unit in the sense that they are true stories about the students, but these should be more focused and exhibit more qualities of good writing.

At the beginning of this unit, it is a good idea to show students the rubric that you will be using to grade their narrative pieces. That way, they will be able to see what they need to accomplish for their narratives at every step of the process.

In addition, it is also beneficial to collect many entries in the brainstorming period. However, I often encourage students to construct a “sloppy copy” as a draft in order to alleviate the pressure of getting the whole thing right the first time. Students will then be able to spend a good deal of time revising their pieces. During the revision and editing stages, you can incorporate word study lessons in order to focus on small bits revision that fit your students’ needs. Don’t forget to celebrate your published pieces!

Unit 3: Narrative Procedure

Unit 4: Feature Article – Focused on Social Studies

This unit corresponds to the non-fiction reading unit, and it is a good idea to utilize texts during the reading block that will be valuable resources for the students’ informational books. Their feature articles should be all about one topic, and it is a good idea to create a theme for the students to choose from. Since students will be taking the State Social Studies Exam in November, one possible unit theme could be the different viewpoints of the Dutch settlers, English settlers, Native Americans, and slaves during the colonization of New York. (These are reoccurring themes on the social studies exam.) With a common themes, you will be able to focus on similar “research questions” when they go looking for information about their topics. For example, the social studies unit could use the research questions: Who were these settlers? Why did they come to New York? What were their daily lives like,? How did they feel about being in New York? How would they have changed New York to suit them? In order to get the full range of the curriculum, the students could also present their projects to their classmates.

The first part of the unit should involve the close study of informational texts, followed by brainstorming of student topics, choosing a topic, researching on notecards, putting notes into words, drafting, revising, editing, publishing, and celebrating. A few lessons on how to take notes and summarize ideas in your own words are also crucial to the unit!

In addition, students need to know how to write “hooks,” strong introductions and conclusions, and explain things in as many details as possible. Lessons on topic sentences and paragraph formation are also extremely important to incorporate.

Unit 5: Literary Essay/ Literary Response

In literary essays, students come up with ideas about characters or their books and support their ideas with examples from the text. They usually have one main idea, followed by three supporting ideas (or three examples) from the stories. The structure of the literary essay is like the five paragraph essays we learned to write in junior high: the first paragraph is the introduction, in which the students introduce the thesis and the three supporting ideas. The second, third, and fourth paragraphs each begin with a topic sentence describing one supporting idea and include examples from the text to support their claims. The last paragraph is the conclusion in which the student reasserts his or her main idea and supporting ideas, and adds a final opinion at the end. A sample thesis would be something like: “In this essay, I will prove that … The supporting ideas might be:

1. Poppleton is a good friend because he helps Cherry Sue get pancakes at the pancake breakfast.

2. Poppleton is a good friend to the geese who fly over his house because he makes them cookies.

3. Poppleton is a good friend to Zacko because he buys a scarf from him even though Zacko made fun of Poppleton’s size.

This unit corresponds with the author study in reading workshop because the students will be reading a lot of short texts with similar themes. They will hopefully discuss those ideas with their reading partners, causing them to challenge each other’s ideas and push themselves to refine their own ideas.

Unit 6: Realistic Fiction and Revision

The Realistic Fiction and Revision Unit is a chance for students to focus heavily on author’s craft, (using techniques like figurative language, suspense, dialogue, internal monologue, and word choice,) in order to enhance fiction stories that they write. Keep in mind that revision is different than editing. Revision is mostly about changing the words of a text and editing is mostly about making the piece correct in terms of spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

The end product of this unit can either be a revision of the students’ personal narrative from the beginning of the year, or an entry taken from their writing notebooks that expand upon.

Unit 7: Writing With Persuasive Purpose: Journalism

For the writing persuasive paper unit, there are many options that can be taken. I have had my students write friendly letters to the principal and business letters to a company in their communities about one thing that they would like to change about the community. An end project that may build a stronger sense of community in the class, however, would be to compile journalistic pieces that are a mosaic of persuasive essays about changing something to do with the world. This topic corresponds well to the reading unit of study, in which students discuss social issues during their book clubs.

The persuasion process can be taught through the following steps:

1. Prewriting and Outlining (Use graphic organizers, webs, and/or outlines to encourage students to organize their thoughts.)

• Creating a Position – formulating an idea that is ONE specific, arguable idea that can be proven with facts and details.

• Building 3 Strong Arguments that Support the Position – arguments should appeal to logic, appeal to right and wrong, appeal to emotion and keep the audience in mind.

• Formulate 3 Descriptive Details That Support Each Argument – this corresponds with the “developing your seed” stage in the writing process

• Taking a survey to use as evidence

2. Drafting

• Taking ideas from an outline and turning into a persuasive essay

• Writing an introduction and conclusion

3. Revising

• Extending Details

• Adding Details

• Cutting unimportant things out

• Using survey results as evidence

4. Editing

• Peer critiques

5. Publishing

• Typing up articles for a newsletter

Unit 8: Poetry

The poetry unit is a wonderful time for both your students and you to engage in some creative lesson plans. Start with an end project in mind before you plan out your lessons for the month. An example end project could be individual poetry books that contain a specific amount of poems or different types of poetry. For example, the students will be able to create poetry books that contain 3 haikus, 8 couplets, 1 cinquain, 1 limerick, 3 free verse poems, etc. Then, formulate your lessons around the forms of poetry and the specific poetic devices that the students need to master such as:

• Using the five senses to describe.

• Word choice

• Alliteration

• Personification

• Hyperboles

• Similes

• Metaphors

• Repetition

• Rhyming

• Punctuation as an “art form”

Unit 9: Memoir and Writing Projects

Some curriculums begin the year with the memoir unit, but the last unit of study should ultimately be a compilation of all your students’ talents. Another idea is to undergo a research project with the students such as a biography. As for any unit, it is crucial to begin the unit with the expectations you want to students achieve as an end result of the writing process.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download