As promised, I wanted to share what we’ve been doing in our classroom with the Thanksgiving Persuasive Writing pack that you can learn more about HERE!
Since persuasive writing is a big deal each year, I put this writing activity together to make it fun and inspire my kids to be creative. Here is a step-by-step guide to show how I taught this in my classroom.
1.) Planning/Prep: Before I started the lesson, I put together these anchor charts that include the posters from my Thanksgiving Persuasive Writing Pack (see below) and printed out the writing and planning pages for the writing activity.
2.) Introduction/Define Core Concepts: We talked about what it means to persuade and discussed the various persuasion techniques are used to convince people to go out and “do something.” Since we are starting off with logos (logic) for now, we then discussed debate and rebuttal later. Students learned that defending their arguments against rebuttals often made their arguments much stronger.
Also as part of my introduction into the lesson, I read:
This might be the BEST book for an introduction to this unit EVER. It’s a about a boy who is about to squish an ant, but before he can, the ant starts talking to him to persuade the boy not to squish him.
3.) Brainstorming: Next, we then brainstormed a bunch of ideas and topics that they have been or could be persuaded on…
4.) Group Activity: I split students up into teams and had them come up with as many facts and logical responses as they could to support their positions. You can have the rest of the class listen to each group and vote for a winner. They LOVED this!
5.) Individual Writing Activity: With the introduction and our first mini-lesson out of the way, my kids were SUPER eager to test their persuasive skills on me using the prompts I created from my Thanksgiving Persuasive pack. I handed out their planning pages, and allowed them to start planning away to persuade me with their first persuasive writing paper of the unit!
7.) Publishing: When it was time to create their published pieces, I had them write it on special publishing paper for the SUPER ADORABLE display in our hallway!
(There is ALWAYS time for super cute hallway displays)
Most of my kids chose the prompt about not eating turkey for Thanksgiving (surprise, surprise!), and once they finished their published pieces, I allowed them to “disguise” a turkey to help with their persuasion!
Here are just a few of my kids’ HILARIOUS reasons, and I wish I would have taken more because these aren’t even some of the BEST ones they came up with!
Here are a few of their hilarious turkeys (please excuse the blur, they were taken on my I-Phone because I forgot my camera that day!)
For those of you who have purchased this, I have added the blank turkey template if you would like to add this fun twist to your students’ writing! Just click HERE or the button below to grab this fun resource to use in your own classroom!
Stay tuned for the next blog post on persuasive writing!
Great post! Thanks for sharing about how you’re teaching persuasive writing. I also love the turkeys. My student did the same activity with the same exact turkey! They turned out so cute!
The REAL Teachers of Orange County
I love this! We loved your Halloween Persuasive Writing unit–I just realized I’ve been meaning to rate that, I’m sorry! Time is just flying by, it feels like it was just Halloween, yikes!
I always love seeing what you do in class Kristine :)
Thanks so much ladies! I appreciate your comments!!! I also love reading what you guys do too!
Examples please!