Claim Writing

We have started our last writing unit of the year. I cannot believe that is true but we are going to end the year with my favorite unit. This last unit could be called an argument unit or opinion unit or a claim unit. I think I love claim writing so much because you get to tell people what you think. Whenever I think of claims I always think about sports. Arguing whether or not Lebron is better than Jordan or if BP is more valuable than Votto is so much fun to me. Hopefully in the next few weeks I can get the class to find claim writing to be just as exciting.

Over the last few days we have been looking at some advertisements and thinking about the claims that they are making. Our first advertisement came from Bic and our second one came from Lego.

When we look at these ads, the students used the See...Say...Support... They first write what they see. We just are looking for the basic ideas. Students told me red legos, ballpoint pen, Bic logo, Lego logo, etc, etc. Then the students write down what the ad says or what is the claim of the ad. In both classes they really did an amazing job of figuring out the claim. Finally the students write down the support from the ad that helped them come up with the claim. Again the class did a great job.

Today instead of looking at claims I wanted the students to come up with some ideas of what they could write about for their final piece. To do this we had the students think about a few of their favorite things. Before they started to make their list, we listened to the song My Favorite Things. 

Then the class made a list of what they noticed about the song. They did a great job of finding different things they found in the song. One great thing they noticed was how the items that were favorites were descriptive. Now that we had looked at the song the students divided a page in two. On one side they wrote their favorites and on the other side things that made them sad.

After all this work the students went through the lists looking for arguments. They quickly realized that all the items could be turned into an argument. We picked one of the ideas and the students did some writing. I think we are off to a great start and I cannot wait to see more arguments tomorrow.

Hope your week is off to a great start.