What's Your Opinion?

What's your favorite restaurant? Have you ever thought about the reasons why you love this place? What about your favorite book or book series? What made you keep turning the pages? These are the types of questions our fifth grade writers pondered as they worked through their first writing project.

During the past month and a half, our fifth grade writers have been working on opinion writing projects. As part of our state standards, students should be able to share and support their opinions of texts and other topics. Students in Mrs. Sowers' writing classes have been doing just that! By writing either a book review or a restaurant review, students shared their opinions and supported those opinions with strong reasons.

To guide students through the process of developing their ideas for this project, Mrs. Sowers has worked with students on idea development, organization, sentence structure, and word choice through mini-lessons. After each mini-lesson, students headed to writers' workshop to write. At the end of workshop time, students shared with their friends the writing they worked on during workshop.

As all writers do, students worked through the writing process for this project. Students went through the following steps throughout this project:

        The Writing Process

              1. Prewriting

              2. Drafting

              3. Revising

              4. Editing

              5. Publishing

              6. Reflecting

Not only did students publish a writing piece, but each student was to have a hand in the creation of a technology project for publishing as well. Some of the media may have included: podcasts, blog posts, Windows Movie Maker, Photo Story 3, and Microsoft PowerPoint. Students gathered information, photographs, and research about their topics to create their media presentations. Each student learned about technology through this process and how to publish writing in a new and creative way.

As you will see, there was a great deal of time and effort behind these writing projects. Each child worked diligently to complete their writing piece and technology project through collaboration with teachers and peers. Students have taken great pride in their creations and would like to share them with an audience. Thank you for taking the time to visit the blog to see what they have done. Mrs. Sowers hopes you will enjoy the final products as much as she has enjoyed assisting students through this process. Who knows. . . Maybe as a result of their hard work you will be influenced to pick up a good book or visit a new restaurant!  Happy reading, listening, and viewing!