Lesson: Comparison & Contrast Poetry Between Child & Parent

Overview: In this lesson, students will examine multiple mentor texts--including Joyce Carol Oats "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"-- to help drive them toward the final persuasive writing task: a comparison and contrast poem written from a parent and a child’s perspective. A short story, two poems, and a song will be analyzed for their use of word choice, idea development, and literary elements. The concept of coming of age or rites of passage will also be analyzed and discussed.

Lesson Author: Sara Kwasna, Nevada high school teacher

Lesson: Thanksgiving Turkey Protests

Overview: The power of persuasion is a life skill. Children use it all the time to outwit their parents, teachers or any other adult essentially obstructing their goal or reward. The mentor text, My Lucky Day, is an example of how the tools of a persuasive argument can be sneaky, sly, or as my students would say, a little sketchy. Students, borrowing ideas from the story, create an original story about a turkey convincing a human not to eat him/her on Thanksgiving.

Lesson Author: Barbara Surritte-Barker, Nevada middle school teacher

Lesson: Character Credo Poems

Overview: An important pre-step in teaching students to write persuasively is to teach them to think objectively from others' perspectives. This lesson asks the students to choose a character from a book or story and then, based on of what they learn about the character, create a “Credo” showing what they believe the character would believe in. Students will assume the role of the character and ten create a “Credo poem” for that character from the character’s point of view.

Lesson Author: Tracey Albee, Nevada high school teacher

Small Group Activity #1: Persuasive Verb Art

Why do we do this? It's very important to possess a strong vocabulary when writing to persuade. At the heart of a strong vocabulary is knowledge of precise nouns and powerful verbs. We believe you should decorate your room with vocabulary when teaching the traits and the genres.

What do we do? As our class begins, participants brainstorm persons and things that persuade us using this noun-inspired alpha-boxes worksheet; they do this in small groups. Next the groups brainstorm verbs that the nouns they've listed would use to persuade us with this verb-inspired alpha-boxes worksheet. Finally, each participant chooses one verb and creates a piece of "verb art." Their drawings must illustrate/demonstrate the big idea behind their persuasive verbs, and they must surround their verb with nouns that they associate with the verb.

We decorate our inservice classroom with these pieces of verb art. We talk about the importance of an activity like this with our students to begin exploring the vocabulary of persuasion. Below are eight unique examples from some of our class's participants. If you click on the images, you can see them in larger form.

Small Group Activity #2: Imitating a Writer with Strong Voice

Why do we do this? NNWP Consultant, Karen McGee, says that you can't teach a student to have voice; the best you can as a teacher is give your students lots of opportunities to "try on the voices of others." This makes sense. Artists find their own style by sketching the work of favorite artists. Musicians find their own style varying the songs of their favorite musicians. Why shouldn't it work for writers too? It does; and when you specifically have students imitate a writer's voice (or word choice or sentence fluency--the two support skills of voice), they begin to discover stylistic elements of writing that might become part of their own toolboxes.

What do we do? WritingFix has a persuasive writing lesson inspired by the first chapter of Farley Mowatt's The Snow Walker (see above for the link to this lesson). Mowatt's voice/style is pretty sophisticated, and although we know this text isn't age-appropriate for many of our workshop participants' students, we believe this activity works best when you use a text that challenges the reader; thus, we assign the nine-page chapter called "Snow" to our adult learners, and we talk a lot about adapting this activity by using age-appropriate texts with different learners.

In groups of four, our participants revisit the "Snow" chapter during class. Each group is responsible for making two posters inspired by the skills of voice (or word choice or sentence fluency, two traits we believe build a foundation for voice). To help identify the skills they are looking for, class participants use these three lists of subskills from our Going Deep with 6 Trait Language Guide. The posters (see sample at left; click on it to see it in larger form) must have three things on them:

• An identified skill of voice, word choice or sentence fluency;
• A short explanation on why the use of that skill builds stronger voice;
• Three or four sentences from the text that demonstrate the skill; these sentences can be successive sentences from the text, or they can be taken from various places in the text.

Below, find the template poster (blank version) each group is provided with and three samples created by our teachers. If you click on the images, you can see them in larger form.

With the posters made and posted, we find that we have surrounded ourselves with the names of skills that can be imitated by writers, explanations of how those skills enhance writing, and sample sentences that demonstrate the skills in action. This is a powerful visual tool to have when teaching voice.

In the on-line WritingFix assignment based on the chapter called "Snow," student writers are challenged to borrow Mowatt's idea of a "Fifth Element." A fifth element, according to Mowatt's chapter, is a modern day discovery that has the potential to change the world. For the lesson WritingFix has posted, students think of a modern day "fifth element" and write an essay that convinces its reader of the importance and significance of the "fifth element" they have chosen; throughout the essay, students are to try out some of the voice techniques they found in Mowatt's essay on snow.

We are now ready to try this strategy in our workshop. The groups are asked to brainstorm possible fifth elements topics, then to write sentences about their "fifth elements" that use the advice (and possibly the sentence styles documented) on their own posters.

Below, find three "fifth element" sentences inspired by the three sample posters above.

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Small Group Activity #3: Who Said it? Posters...Three Voices from Differing Perspectives

Why do we do this? An important element when teaching persuasive writing is to ask students to think about different perspectives on interesting issues. Some students think that "Well, I am right about this and you are wrong!" is a valid argument, but it persuades no one. As student debaters learn, when persuading one must predict an opponent's next argument before he/she has ever spoken it aloud. To do that, you need to have thought about others' possible viewpoints.

What do we do? Inspired by the Three-Voice Storyboard Activity from the NNWP's Going Deep with Compare and Contrast Thinking Guide, we ask teachers at our workshop to partner up and create three one-sentence perspective statements about one of the following eight issues. The goal is to imagine three specific roles who would have three differing viewpoints on the issue. Once imagined, they think of three statements that might be uttered by the three roles. This begins to bring their roles to life.

With simple statements written on their three-voice storyboard worksheets, parters are now ready to begin creating Who Said It? posters. As seen in the example at right, the writing partners need to turn their single statements into three- or four-sentence monologues. These monologues will be used as a kind of riddle later. Eventually, others will need to make a guess about who each monologue is being spoken by, so it's important for writers not to directly give away their monologues' speakers in the words they put down.

If you click on the teacher model at left, you can see it in larger form.

Below, you can see (and click on to see larger) four of the posters created by our workshop's participants.

Small Group Activity #4: Why We Must Run with Scissors Jigsaw...Activities to Ignite Student Interest in Persuasive Writing

Why do we do this? During the 2009-2010 school year, we received a small grant that allowed us to purchase books for all of our persuasive writing workshops' participants. The book we chose to purchase for them was Barry Lane and Gretchen Bernabei's Why We Must Run With Scissors: Voice Lessons in Persuasive Writing. This book is designed to spark students interest on the topic of persuasive writing, and many of the lessons ask students to think about persuasive writing techniques with a sense of humor. The book is full of very useable lessons and exercises.; as a whole group, we study the first chapter of introductory lessons, and we study the book's title lesson: Why We Must Run with Scissors. To help our participants see the variety of lessons in the remainder of the book, we do jigsaw activity.

What do we do? Each group randomly draws one of the assigned chapters from this 5-page jigsaw packet. They have thirty minutes to create a presentation that 1) summarizes the book's activity; 2) extends upon the book's suggested "spin-offs," and 3) discusses how the book's suggested mentor text (each activity suggests a supplemental text that can enhance the lesson) might be used when teaching it.