Ventas

Your first goal will be to inspire kids to regard information books as inspiring and compelling. You will want to enter the unit with a class of writers who are dying to do this work. Show students some of your favorite published nonfiction books, including those you have selected as mentors, and tell them what you love about those books— or let students browse and mark and talk about favorite pages and parts. Sometimes, kids will turn first to the illustrations or interesting text features. If so, you can explain that there is an art to writing books that entice a reader into learning a lot. Writers do sometimes include illustrations or text boxes or grabber-leads that are intended as ways to collar the reader and bring that reader’s attention to the rest of the page. You can help your students, too, to go from those initially appealing sections to the rest of the page—to the compelling anecdotes and descriptions that are as interesting, if not as eye-catching, as the passages. The DK readers and the Seymour Simon books in particular include a lot of vivid writing.

One way to recruit young writers to write with intensity is to share a vision with them right from the start of what will happen to their published pieces. Are you mak- ing a library of books about the solar system that will grace the shelves of the science classroom, be available for all young scientists, and be read to a younger grade or to students the following year? Are you adding to the nonfiction books you have avail- able for independent reading in your classroom, so that students can find expert books on training for soccer, the history of the woolly mammoth, and how coyotes are beginning to live in cities? Or you may even decide to make nonfiction books you will send to schools where students are eager for beautiful texts in English, such as small

A CURRICULARPLAN FOR THEWRITINGWORKSHOP, GRADE4, 2011–2012 80

schools in Africa where classes are taught in English. One thing is for sure—kids knowing that their books will be handled and read by other readers (not just read aloud to other readers, but that individual, interested readers will turn the pages themselves, lingering over the words and images) really increases the intensity, and thus their stamina and zeal for doing high-level work. You may have on hand a few terrific information books that kids have made in prior years—if so, share them with students to inspire them.

After teaching your writers that information books can be compelling, your next goal will be to teach writers that one of the first things that an informational writer does is select a topic and focus that topic, narrowing it to the most interesting aspects of the topic. Your goal will not be to help writers come up with a topic for their writ- ing—remember that if you catch someone a fish, they eat for a day; if you teach them to fish, they eat for a lifetime. Your goal, then, at the very start of the unit is to equip your students with a small repertoire of strategies that they can use again and again in life whenever they want to select a topic for informational writing. You’ll probably want students to explore several possible topics (this makes it more likely that they will settle on a topic on which they have information and it gives you some time to cycle through the classroom, conferring with writers to edge them toward topics in which they seem especially knowledgeable and invested). Most teachers encourage writers to use their writer’s notebooks as a place for recording ideas for informational writing. Some teachers suggest it helps to think, “If I had to teach a course to the other kids in the class, what might I teach?” That question, for some children, can be a more supportive one than the more generic: “What am I an expert in?” Thinking “What would I teach this class?” leads a writer to consider not only his or her expertise but also the interests of a likely audience.

You could teach your students that some nonfiction writers try on ideas by writing potential back- of- the-book blurbs as a way to imagine how their books might go and why those books would interest readers. As writers collect ideas in their writer’s note- books, you’ll want to make sure that rehearsal does not mean just writing a few words onto the page and calling it a day. You could suggest that writers record not just pos- sible topics but possible subtopics within each topic. Writers could go further and think about subtopics within whatever subtopic interests them especially. Students will need conferences and small-group help to shift from writing about sharks to writ- ing about sharks’ eyes, and they might balk a bit at the idea of revising their topics. Keep in mind, however, that front-end revision during these early days will prove much more acceptable to students than later revisions that require them to discard many pages of work. Of course, some less proficient writers may have more success with broader topics—sharks, not shark eyes—and some more proficient writers may be able to handle a topic that is an idea, not just a subject (sharks’ eyes are very differ- ent than ours).

Some teachers suggest writers engage in a bit of research to try on possible topics, and there may be some value in ascertaining whether there are any readily available and accessible texts on a topic. But remind your fourth graders that, in general, writers don’t generally start from scratch. It would be much more of a challenge for someone

A CURRICULARPLAN FOR THEWRITINGWORKSHOP, GRADE4, 2011–2012 81

to write a book about training for basketball if he or she didn’t play basketball or even watch it. For someone else, it would be a snap to get started with that—he or she could imagine the whole book and could thus focus on learning to organize informa- tion and write well.

Once your writers have spent a session or two trying on topics, you can teach your more advanced writers in a small-group session to begin thinking about a focus or perspective for their topics. Perspective does not necessarily mean that children will be writing opinions. But by grade five, the Common Core State Standards specify that information writers introduce a topic clearly and provide a general observation and focus. You may have some fourth graders in your class who are ready to do this work. For example, the topic “Cheetahs Are Endangered” suggests that the writer has a per- spective or an angle on the topic and presumably the writer will go forward with this. Such a topic may seem at first to readers to be an opinion, making the text into opin- ion writing, but actually this is just the aspect of the topic that the writer has decided to highlight. To help your students make similar choices, each with his or her own in- dividual topic, you’ll probably want to help writers ask questions such as, “What do I want to say to my readers?” and “What do I feel is important for someone to know and feel after reading my piece?”

Probably by the share session at the end of the fourth day, you’ll want each child to have chosen his or her topic with the stronger writers selecting more focused topics. The subject of “Soccer Goalie” or better yet, “The Challenges of the Soccer Goalie,” will make for better writing than “Soccer.” The less experienced writer, on the other hand, will have more success with the broader, more general topic, such as “Soccer.” Keep in mind that because the focus of this unit is on good writing, not on research, you’ll want to encourage students to choose subtopics or perspectives (as well as top- ics) on which they have expertise. Some of these topics emerge from nonfiction read- ing students have done, and sometimes students will want to choose different topics. In general, the more specific and focused your writers’ topics are, the more sophisti- cated their writing will be. Just as choosing a focused, zoomed-in, small moment en- ables a personal narrative writer to write with greater specificity and elaboration, choosing a focused topic enables an information writer to do the same.

Once writers have chosen a topic, you can move them toward planning the parts or categories for their topic. Teach them some of the different ways that writers plan for how their information texts will go. One way writers plan is to think of a table of contents for their work, determining the chapters that they could put in their book. Writers also might use boxes and bullets to plan, with their boxes containing topics and subtopics rather than claims (as in essay writing). If you have opportunities to do some small-group work to support this, writers will certainly profit from some close- in feedback. You can help writers understand that when breaking a topic into parts, the parts need to cover the entire topic. One can’t write a book on the United States and write just about four randomly selected states—but one could write about the Eastern, Southern, Western, and Central United States. If that list of component parts of the United States included New York City in it, that would be odd, because usually component parts need to be of equal weight and parallel. It is helpful to teach stu-

A CURRICULARPLAN FOR THEWRITINGWORKSHOP, GRADE4, 2011–2012 82

dents ways that information pieces are typically divided. For example, information writers often use parts, kinds, or times. If some of your students struggle to think of categories or subtopics, you could teach them in a small group that writers can always go back and revise their topics, perhaps making them broader. That is to say, perhaps their original topic choice is really a subtopic under a broader category about which they have more to say. Additionally, you’ll want to coach writers into creating cate- gories that feel parallel in weight.

Part Two: Writers Gather a Variety of Information to Support Their