Chapter 4

[Grace]

This chapter dives into topics related to students’ abilities to write informational pieces. One idea that the textbook presents is having teachers provide writing pieces of this genre (or a different genre) for students to look at. Students should be able to read the piece then analyze it to learn about the different tactics they can use to write informational pieces. In the textbook it gives teachers a table that is divided into features of informational writing, learning goals (SWBAT) and minilessons that can be found in this book. I found this very useful as it can provide teachers with different techniques to help students learn how to write an informational piece. Since there is a section in the table with learning goals, teachers would be able to use these goals in the classroom to show students the end goal in the lesson. There is another worksheet that could help teachers, that they can print for their students to use when they are deciding on a topic. This worksheet provides room for students to find different sources, then further analyze them into subtopics they could write about. I think this tool is very helpful in the classroom because it allows students to physically see the differences in the sources that they sound. It would also help students to pick which sources are the strongest for their writing piece.