A Fast-and-Furious Unit to Introduce Opinion Writing
I’ve previously talked about Penny Kittle + Kelly Gallagher’s concept of writing “laps”, which they introduced in 180 Days. The big idea is that students are given multiple opportunities to write in a genre by offering small, medium, and large “laps” around the writing track.
We know that students need to practice skills and practice writing in genres multiple times before they can possibly begin to master it, so it makes to provide a few opportunities for students to put these skills to practice.
My letter to the editor unit is a medium lap. A quick piece of shorter writing that has real world stakes as we write for an authentic audience — our local newspaper.
Before we get into my unit, here are a couple of things you should know:
1) This is an intentionally fast unit because if we are going to write to our local paper, we need to write + send those letters before the facts change.
While I had always planned for this to be a shorter unit, this really hit home as students started writing letters about our very poor rate of vaccine administration in Virginia … and then it suddenly picked up and their arguments were obsolete!
2) You’re going to need to find your own mentor texts.
Realistically, my students aren’t likely to have a letter to the editor published in the New York Times. Plus, the issues written about in the times don’t have the same kind of direct impact as those issues covered in our local paper.
So, go to your local paper. (I paid $2 to get a digital subscription for 2 months. I created a login and password that I shared with students so they could read unlimited articles, too.)
I did not agonize over which letters to choose. Instead of choosing a handful of PERFECT MENTOR TEXTS THAT TEACH IT ALL, I quickly chose a couple each day that we could read through in the context of the mini-lesson. The benefit of this was that students had a ton of exposure to different letters, each giving them different inspiration.
Our newspaper has a Correspondent of the Day. See if yours does, and start there.
The Unit
Tips + Insights
To be honest, I did this little letter to the editor inquiry activity because I was going to be absent for professional development, but I wanted the kids to get moving on this unit. But I really like the way it worked out. It’s a more structured way of getting students engaged with mentor texts while leading them to construct some big ideas around the genre.
The Read Around a few days later did something similar: got more mentor texts in front of kids’ eyes while encouraging them to start developing ideas for their own piece.
When students flash drafted this time, most had only short paragraphs to show for it. Don’t panic! This is okay. It’s a start. And it’s a lot more than a blank page. What this ended up revealing to students as we moved deeper into the unit was that they had almost no evidence at all. And finding and using evidence to support our opinions because the real focus of this unit.
Do claims have to be up front? Of course not! This is ONE way writers do it, and I shared that with students. This is one option that we are learning this time because it’s a really easy way to do it, and we can see it in lots of real letters. When we do another lap of persuasive writing, we’ll learn a different way to state the claim.
My favorite lesson in this unit was the inside and outside the brain evidence sorting activity. I made a copy of the sorting slide for each student, and they put it in their digital notebooks. Somehow, asking students to drag the different types of evidence to the brain, to outside the head completely, or on the line helped students remember this concept so much better. This is one time that what I did digitally was BETTER than what I would normally do.
In the student overview doc, you’ll notice a link to a few Jamboards where students volunteered to help one another. While this is one, more targeted answer to “peer editing”, I did it because my students were finishing at wildly different rates this time around. Since some students were finishing so quickly and adeptly, it seemed like a good idea to put them to work and see if they could help one another in a targeted, focused way. I just put mini-lessons on sticky notes and let students volunteer to help!
I love this little unit because by the end almost every student can be really successful — success on a couple of paragraphs is super-achievable. Now my students are sending them off to our paper to see if any of them can get published!