How do you eat your OREO's?

To help us understand the structure of persuasive writing, we brought OREOs into the classroom today!  While we had a great time eating them, and completing the OREO challenge - the purpose of this was to help the students understand and remember to write using their OREOs:

O pinion
R eason
E xample
O pinion

We used the latest announcement from Hekia Parata, the Minister of Education about Community Of Online Learning (COOL) as our base board for our work today.  We listened carefully for the different perspectives given in the report - knowing that facts are valuable, and therefore could be something we could include in our own writing.  We wrote them around the outside of the clip - which is why they look so strange.

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We talked about what COOLs were, how they would work and looked at some of the media coverage from this announcement.  Interestingly, the students formed their opinions about these very quickly, and not in the way I was expecting!  Unanimously, the students thought this was a bad idea - no matter how much I tried to (strategically) convince them otherwise!  I thought and had prepared to argue the opposite!

The students brainstormed their ideas, and then ranked them according to their strengths.  They also needed to decide who they wanted to be their audience - with many of them asking me if they could send their writing to the Minister when they finish!  It was great to see such a buzz!

Fact or Opinion?

As we start moving into persuasive writing, we have had to explore what the difference is between fact and opinion.

As a group, we decided that an opinion is:

• Your own thoughts and ideas
• Your point of view
• Your preference

Opinions are all about YOU!

We then talked about facts.  We decided that facts provide:

• Real information
• Proven Points
• Information supported by others

Facts help to change the readers mind.

The purpose of persuasive writing is to change the audience (readers) thinking.

There is a place for both facts and opinions in persuasive writing.

To help us understand the difference between facts and information, we looked at a selection of online examples of persuasive writing.  As we read each example we looked for evidence of facts and opinions, circled them and ticked them off on the whiteboard.  You can see from this that facts are really important in Persuasive writing.  This is the reason why we started with report writing this term.  To write a great piece of persuasive writing - you need to know your stuff!  Our Opinions must be backed up with Reasons and Examples.  We also need to keep thinking about the Purpose of our piece of writing, and who the Audience is.

At the end of each piece we voted on the topic, and then got quite involved in looking at the statistics!  The students were particularly interested in the differences between the way the boys and the girls voted, and how younger students, and Grade 5 students voted.  It was fascinating to see the differences in the data.

Here are links to the persuasive writing examples we looked at (there are hundreds more on the website that you can read at home!)

Should circuses stop using wild animals? Should students learn a foreign language? Should schools allow cell phones? Should kids have a TV in their bedrooms?

Learning in Context

This week we had a group of students from Japan arrive at Rangeview.  We greeted them on Wednesday morning with a whole school Powhiri, and as many of the students in our ALL group are also in Kapa Haka, we felt it was important that the students attended this event.

The students shared with us information about Japan, and also their school - Atagohama.  This was a great example of report writing in action - with factual information that had specifically been designed for our students.  It also provided a great context for us to compare the quality of information we had written in our own reports and reconsider whether it was the best information to have included.

This week we also spent some time talking about the importance of a really strong introduction.  We talked about how the introduction of a report is where you will convince the reader that it is worth taking the time to read the rest of what you have written.

I have started putting together the Powerpoint presentation that we are using within our ALL group.  This will be added to in preparation for each session, and by putting it here it means that you, as parents are able to talk through these key points with your child, and they are also able to access it to support them with their learning in other classes here at school.

Teaching and Learning Resources to support ALL students.  Click to view.

We have been using these resources to rework the introductions for our reports that we started last week.  We started by improving our own introduction, before sharing this in small groups for feedback.  We then identified the best parts from each and used these to recreate a collaborative introduction on the HP streams.

Here is the link to our collaborative report 

We will be working to complete this next week before choosing an Olympics based theme to write our next report on.  The highlighted words in these introductions indicate the topic specific vocabularly that was used.  These words were selected by members of the other group, helping them to engage in and critically read the work of others.