Winter Writing Workshop

In the first trimester our writing focused on narrative writing, drawing from personal experiences in order to learn and practice the mechanics of writing.  In this last trimester we focused on opinion writing; learning to convince others of what we believe in our heart and think in our brain.

We learned to state our opinion, give three reasons to support our opinion and close the piece with an ending that restated our opinion.  We began with solving problems we observed around the school, letting others know our reasons for believing how we could improve what we saw.

We moved to reading an informational story and then forming an opinion based on what was written in the text.  For example, we pondered what we thought was the best season after reading a passage about seasons and gave convincing reasons why we thought one season was better than another.  We read about living in the city versus living in the country and used what we learned to write why we thought it better to live in one of those places... we used some of our own background knowledge, but also cited what was written in the text to support our opinion.


Narrative writing earlier in the year gave us an opportunity to add dialogue to what characters were saying... moving to opinion writing was very different as we began to tell people what we believed and why.

We still use good writing strategies learned earlier in the year... planning out our writing ahead by tapping out the words and rereading over and over again to be sure we write all the words we intend to and asking, "Does that make sense?"

Word work focused on sight words during other parts of our day support the writing we do in writing workshop... confidence in write exact words and using the word wall to be sure we spell words we know correctly.

We use sight word lists, the word wall and even words we know in our reading books to spell and sound out words.

Closing an opinion piece by restating what we believe so the reader can understand our reasons and the purpose of why we are writing.

Self-assessment: Students can now use a checklist to check their work for elements that they should include in their writing.  Rather than saying they are done and asking a teacher to check it they can be responsible for their own work and assess what they need to add and how they can make it the best it can be.