How Writer’s Work- Narrative

In the How Writers Work unit of study, students will understand the writing process and get to know how and why writers write in the ways they do. Students will find out all of the different reasons why we write and have the opportunity to build their own writing identities. The books in the study will help students read closely, think about the authors’ purposes, and understand them as people as well as writers.

Students will:

• Use mentor texts as inspiration for writing
• Recognize different purposes for writing
• Reflect on their own writing identities
• Understand the purposes of the various writing process stages
• Create a published piece of writing using the stages of the writing process

Personal Narrative- Narrative

In the Personal Narrative unit of study, students will tell the big and small stories of their lives. Personal narratives are typically the easiest, most natural form of writing for children because the stories are already complete inside their minds, which enables the words to flow more easily onto the paper. It is this easy flow of words that supports students’ efforts to produce a complete piece of writing.

Students will:

• Demonstrate an understanding of the purpose behind personal narrative writing through the writing process
• Begin to use what they have learned and noticed about personal narrative writing to generate their own ideas for writing personal narratives in their Writer’s Notebook and for publication purposes
• Publish a narrative in which they recount a well-elaborated event or short sequence of events that includes details to describe actions, thoughts, and feelings
• Focus on descriptive words, verbs, capitalization, text layout, punctuation in dialogue, adjectives, and sentence structure

Author Study (Gail Gibbons)- Informational

In the Author Study unit of study, students will examine Gail Gibbons who is a wonderful writing mentor for second grade writers. Students will connect easily to Gibbons’s choice of topics represented in this unit: submerged ships, planet Earth, building a house, honeybees, recycling, caves, and rainforests. She will help students discover that the world around them is full of opportunities to explore, question, ponder, and investigate. Gibbons shows us that writing in order to think, question, and learn is something we should do every day.

Students will:

• Learn about the author Gail Gibbons as a writer, illustrator, and person
• Identify how Gibbons uses her life experiences, curiosity, interests, and observations about the world around her to generate ideas for writing
• Name the nonfiction techniques and features Gibbons uses in her texts to develop topics and present information
• Begin to use what they have learned from Gibbons as inspiration for their own writing and drawing
• Select a topic to focus on and strengthen their writing as needed by revising and editing
• Use a variety of digital tools and sources to research, gather information, and produce writing
• Publish an informative/explanatory piece in which the students introduce a topic, use facts and definitions to develop points, and provide a concluding section
• Incorporate Gibbons’ nonfiction text features in their own published work
• Focus on descriptive words, verbs, capitalization, text layout, adjectives, and sentence structure

Letter Writing-Opinion

In the Letter Writing unit of study, students will learn the many purposes of composing both formal and informal letters. Letters can have a multitude of purposes. They can be informal when written between friends or formal when written for business purposes. They can be requests for information, offer complaints or praise, or share opinions. More formal letters can be meant to persuade a reader to action or to request the cessation of action. The need for humans to communicate has not gone away even as technology has changed modern life.

Students will:

• Identify common features of letters
• Write individual and class letters for a real audience
• Experiment with different types of letters for various purposes with various styles including informative/explanatory letters, persuasive letters, narrative letters and thank you letters
• Focus on a letter writing topic and strengthen writing as needed by revising and editing
• Understand the structure and tone of both formal and informal letters
• Publish a letter that expresses their opinion on a topic or book, uses reasons and examples that support the opinion, and provides a concluding statement
• Focus on descriptive words, verbs, capitalization, text layout, adjectives, and sentence structure