Non Fiction Writing

What I learned about teaching non fiction writing was this:

1. First, have your kids read (as readers) lots of non fiction articles.

2. Have your kids read as WRITERS non fiction articles.

3. Have them notice what are in non fiction articles:

    *  font, captions, pictures, graphs, charts, questions, leads, stats, quotes, interviews, headings, leads, conclusions, surveys, websites, etc...

4. We spent time learning what the parts of non fiction articles look like and how the author uses them. I checked out a ton of books out of the library and the kids spent time looking through them and identifying the parts they had.

5.  I used a checklist of things you would like to find in a non fiction articles and then we would read 5th grade articles to see if/how they were used.  This was handy to have the stock of articles because when a kid wanted to put a good lead in his article I could say, "Look back to how those writers did it...try them out in YOUR article".  It was so powerful for them to see for themselves.

6.  Before anyone began writing an article I had them make a list of possible topics. THen, in a T chart:  Things I Already Know I Can Write About ( they have to know SOMETHING in order to have a point of view or be able to write anything in their own words).  The other side of the chart would be:  Things I Want to Know  (this helped them be specific when we went to the internet to look up facts. I had them do this several times to be sure the topic choice was solid. Despite this there was, of course, one or two kids who slipped through without great topics that were hard to write about.

7.  We learned how to ask Thick questions instead of Thin questions to an "Expert" we could interview.  This was a good review of when and  how to use quotation marks. Thick questions cannot be answered just "yes" or "no" and have many answers.

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