Informative Writing Lion Style!

Let me begin by telling you that when I put this informative writing into my lesson plans, it was only to last a week.  However with assemblies and MAP testing, one week magically turned into two.  Don't get me wrong, I am not upset that it took longer than anticipated, but we are getting down to the last weeks of school and somehow I feel like we have soooooooooooo much still to cover.  :(

I saw a post on The Inspired Apple about how she introduced and worked through informative writing and really loved how engaged the kiddos appeared.  I tweeked things to meet the needs of my little owls and POOF!  here is what we got.

We started the whole experience by coming up with questions that we would like answered.  I placed their questions on post it notes and as answers came up in readings, they were added to the post it.  It took a bit of prying to get questions coming but after a bit of "knee partner" sharing, the questions were overwhelming.

 

 We read a couple of books the next day and then drew a lion and labeled the parts.  Each owl turned this into a page in their lion books.

 

We read several more books and played around with searching for lion facts on the computer.  This was definitely a highlight to this process.  After we had answered all the questions and read a good amount of books, we created a lion tree map using what we had learned.

 

Each owl picked two interesting facts from the tree map to put into their own tree maps.  These tree maps were later used to make the two pages in their books that talked about lions.

Diagram of a lion was page 1.



 "Lions are big cats."

"Lions are carnivores."  Love the pig trapped in the middle of the two lions. 

I was extremely proud of all of their hard work during this writing.  If you are thinking of doing something similar, please remember that writing is a process and that it will take patience.  I will admit I was full of stress during a couple of these days, but when the end product was handed in and their smiles were so big, I couldn't have felt happier.  :)

~Erin