This Lesson's Title:

Pros, Cons, and Hooks

a short essay that examines both sides of a job

This lesson was created for WritingFix after being proposed by Northern Nevada teacher Penny Sanchez at an SBC-sponsored inservice class.

The intended "mentor text" to be used when teaching this on-line lesson is the picture book How I Became a Pirate by Melinda Long. Before writing, students should listen to and discuss the writing style of this book's author.

Check out How I Became a Pirate at Amazon.com.

Washoe County teachers, click here to search for this book at the county library.

Three-Sentence Overview of this Lesson:

The writer will research an interesting job (past, present or--perhaps--even future) and prepare to write about it.  While researching, the writer will obtain a list of "pro" benefits associated with their researched jobs, and "con" consequences associated with their researched jobs.  Using the provided graphic organizer, students create a summary of their research that contains a strong lead , a conclusion that comes back to their lead's original idea, and a paragraph that focuses on job pros and another paragraph on job cons. Teachers: Click here to see the entire lesson plan.

6-Trait Overview for this Lesson:

The focus trait in this writing assignment is organization; this writing prompt comes with a graphic organizer that will require writers to pre-plan paragraphs that have a purpose.  The support trait in this assignment is sentence fluency; using subordinating conjunctions will require that students create longer, flowing sentences.