Grade 1 Opinion Writing: Persuasive Letters
- Use their writing to persuade others
- State an opinion and provide reasons to support that opinion
- Identify real-life problems and propose solutions to those problems
- Imagine different audiences and write with a specific audience in mind
- Revise their writing by adding details and examples
- Edit their writing to make sure it’s easy to read
Grade 2 Opinion Writing: Persuasive Reviews
- Use their writing to persuade others.
- Recognize that they have a voice and that writing can be a vehicle to share what they think with others.
- Write with detail and use strong examples that will convince others of their argument.
- Revise their writing to add more details to support their argument.
- Edit their writing to make sure it’s ready to share.
- Write a number of reviews and choose one to revise and publish.
Grade 3 Opinion Writing: Persuasive Reviews and Speeches/Letters
- State an opinion and give reasons to support it.
- Create an organizational structure for reasons and use linking words and Phrases to help their reader access that structure.
- Group reasons or supports into subcategories, elaborate on those
subcategories from personal experience and begin to think about
counterarguments
- Understand how to write to persuade others to believe what they believe and, ultimately, take action.
- Produce a notebook or folder full of reviews and revise them often to incorporate new skills learned.
Grade 4 The Personal & Persuasive Essay
- Be able to provide support for a claim in ways that chunk the supportive evidence into logically grouped categories
- Use transitional words, such as for instance, in order to, consequently, and specifically
- Use phrases that convey the relationship between the chunks of the
text and the main claim such as one reason that is and an even more
important reason for …. is
- Produce persuasive essays that draw on specific details to support
claims, embedding quotations, anecdotes, statistics, or observations
into the body paragraphs
- Have a clear understanding of the format of essay
Grade 5 The Interpretive Essay
- Write and revise two essays: one personal essay where students use
evidence from their own lives and literature to support their big idea
about themselves; a second literary essay where students are invited to
elaborate more formally on ideas they are developing about a character
in literature.
- Practice growing ideas, making a claim, collecting and organizing
supportive evidence for that claim, and laying out that evidence in a
logical fashion for readers.
- Write in a logical structure, conveyed partly through transitional
phrases that build relationships between chunks of the text and the main
claim.
- Use quotations, anecdotes, and observations within paragraphs to elaborate on big idea(s) / thesis