Mountain Biking Anyone?

A new year means a new direction. This time we are diving into persuasive writing, but don't tell the students. We are going to let them figure it out on their own. It all started with If..then statements. We decided to to dive into the idea of mountain biking.



From there, we came up with a group If...then statement about running. This led us to our weekly homework where we were able to practice our new skill by writing a topic sentence per day. These sentences came into school the next day for us to share and modify.

Our next writing lesson revolved around five different teacher labeled topic sentence buckets. Students were given index cards to fill in with details that would work for any of the given buckets.

As a class, we went through the mountain biking bucket to decide what index cards made sense and which ones did not. The cards that didn't make sense were discussed and then tossed. Each group was then given a bucket to go through the same way. In the end, each group presented.

The next week's homework, involved a series of ideas about caring for teeth. Students were given a two column note format with listed main ideas for them to sort. The main ideas were brushing, flossing and eating right. Students had to go through the many ideas to decide what would work and what would not, organize them by topic, and come up with or even use an idea from the list as a catchy closing.







In class, this was developed by having students organize the group index cards for the the mountain biking paragraph. At this point the students were able to tell us we were writing a persuasive piece. They came up with three big ideas and many details for each heading. As a group, we decided that going fast was the most important with seeing new sights and off roading placing second and third respectively. Finally, each group was given one small stack to prioritize. You can see the order of importance here.


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