Teach Non-Fiction Writing...

contunuation from Teaching Non-Fiction Reading...
Non-Fiction Writing
After a good deal of experience with a topic your students will be ready to write about what they learned. You can provide some shared writing lessons (See How to Use Shared Writing to Teach Writing Skills) based on the shared reading and KWL chart you generated. It would be a good time to model how to write an "All About…." or a "Question and Answer" book.



In your shared writing lessons you want to demonstrate:

>how you decide what is important;
>how you organize your information;
>that you address one topic at a time;
>that you include illustrations, models, graphs, and charts to explain ideas;
>how you stretch out words or copy them accurately from the text or vocabulary charts on display;
>how you decide upon a format and maintain the format throughout the text.




Developing a rubric with your students will help them synthesize their learning about non-fiction. It will serve as both a guide to writing non-fiction and an assessment tool for the students and yourself.



+Help them to decide what's very important, somewhat important, and not so important to include in their book.

+Have them evaluate the use of illustrations: do they help the reader understand the information or topic?

+Have them choose information that may not be so important to include, but that they think is interesting or fun for the reader and themselves.

+Evaluate the organization of information.

+Evaluate the presentation of information.

+Evaluate their work: does it meet writing standards for mechanics and spelling.



As a culminating activity, you might want to have the children share their work with their parents or peers at an author's party. Such hard work deserves a celebration!