Lucy Calkins Units of Study Essay Writing Book 3 Lesson # 1 Collecting Ideas as Essayists Minutes Teacher Behavior Teaching Point Essayists observe and then grow ideas about those observations Gives examples of writers who observed first, then pushed themselves to develop insights, and recorded the new insights Uses examples of work (professional author or student author) to show students how authors observe, develop insights, and then record the new insights. Students make observations of things in the classroom and then create a thought of what they have observed Informally monitoring students and conferring about ideas Mid-workshop Teaching Point: Just like students collected ideas for narrative writing, there are strategies for collecting ideas for essays. One way is to start with small observations and then come up with a big thought OR you can start with big ideas and let the ideas lead you to the details. Sharing writing with class Students begin essay entries into their notebooks and collect ideas for future entries, Students look through their entries with a partner and compare to entries they made during the narrative unit. They discuss how they have changed.
Lucy Calkins Units of Study Essay Writing Book 3 Lesson # 2 Growing Essay Ideas in Notebooks Teaching Point: Essay writers develop systems that help us not only to observe, but also to grow ideas. Demonstrate systems (i.e. using response/thinking stems such as This makes me realize ) you use to push yourself to develop thoughts from your observations. Spotlight a child that has already used the strategies or systems you described to the students. Informally monitoring students and conferring about ideas and observations. Mid-workshop Teaching Point: Students will need to write more entries in a day then they did during narrative writing because their entries are shorter. Show students how to think of a subject that is important to them and think of ideas that go with the subject. Sharing writing with class Students work with partners to make observations and then reflect on the observations that they made. Students begin essay entries into their notebooks and collect ideas for future entries, Students begin essay entries into their notebooks and collect ideas for future entries, Students share their entries with partners.
Lucy Calkins Units of Study Essay Writing Book 3 Lesson # 3 Contrasting Narrative and Non-Narrative Structures Teaching Point: Writers need to know the specific structure they plan to use when writing both narrative and non-narrative pieces of writing. Contrast the features of narrative and non narrative writing. Create and post a chart that shows the features of non-narratives and essays. Explain that writers decide if they will structure their writing as a narrative (story) or a non-narrative (essay). Demonstrate how to write about one topic using a narrative structure and a nonnarrative structure. Compare and contrast the two. Monitor and circulate while students are studying different text structures. Interject to lift the level of thinking. Mid-workshop Teaching Point: Identifying the main categories (chunks) of an essay and other features. Use a sample essay for students to help determine the parts of the essay. Clarifying the concept of writing about ideas. Students tell a story to partners using a narrative structure. Then use the same topic to write in the air using a non-narrative structure. Students read texts chosen by the teacher and separate books into non-narrative and narrative structures. Students choose an essay that they particularly like and talk with a partner about what the writer has done. Students work with partners to point out ideas in their writing, or to figure out starting points for new ideas.
Lucy Calkins Units of Study Essay Writing Book 3 Lesson # 4 Using Conversational Prompts to Spur Elaboration Teaching Point: Writers can help themselves stay with one idea for a longer time by talking about their ideas. Use a transcript of a book talk from earlier in the year (it is possible to use a discussion from Making Meaning for this) to show students how they help grow each other s ideas. Point out words students used (To add on, For example, This is important because, etc) that could be used in writing essays to explore a single idea. Informally monitoring students and conferring about chosen essay topics. Mid-workshop Teaching Point: Share another way that students can structure an essay focusing on a different way to start an essay than previously taught. Students practice using conversational prompts to extend an idea given by the teacher. Students help create a chart of conversational prompts that could be used to extend an essay idea. Students continue writing in writing notebooks on previous essay topics or start new ones. Share samples of work from students who used conversational prompts to extend their essay ideas. Students share with partners their writing and how they elaborated on ideas.
Lucy Calkins Units of Study Essay Writing Book 3 Lesson # 5 Generating Essay Writing From Narrative Writing Teaching Point: Writers can revisit narrative pieces and add insights and embedding them into ideas. Revisit a personal narrative entry written earlier in the year and a list of questions titled Questions Writers Ask of Earlier Entries. Show students that referring to this list of questions helps us to explore writing that was done earlier. Model how a writer can use previous entries to generate new entries, even in a different genre. Informally monitoring students and conferring about chosen essay topics. Mid-workshop Teaching Point: Students don t have to always use strategies from the charts to generate ideas, they can create their own strategies. Point out a strategy that a specific student has used to generate more essay ideas that isn t on the chart. Share samples of work from students who used conversational prompts to extend their essay ideas. Students work with partners to revisit narrative entries in their notebooks. Partners question each other using the questions from the posted list. Students continue writing in writing notebooks on previous essay topics or start new ones. Students engage in the sharing and comment on student work.
Lucy Calkins Units of Study Essay Writing Book 3 Lesson # 6 Finding and Crafting Thesis Statements Teaching Point: Writers reread their writing to find or invent a seed idea a thesis statement when written in expository text. Demonstrate the way an essayist rereads previous entries looking for a seed idea. Explain to students that sometimes the idea is right there on the paper and other times it comes about when you think, What do I really, really want to say? Be very clear that when students were working with personal narratives they looked for seed stories, and in essays they are looking for one single idea. The seed is much smaller in essays than in personal narratives. Model how writers choose from several different seed ideas. Use one piece of writing and select two seed ideas for consideration. Use a student s writing the same way, looking for multiple seed ideas to choose between. Informally monitoring students conferring about their selected seed ideas. Mid-workshop Teaching Point: Checking thesis statements that students are writing. Share the chart Questions Writers Ask of Theses Direct students to work intently on their thesis statements and refer to the chart for support. Students won t share today they will continue to look for ideas to turn into thesis statements. Students work as a whole class focusing on one student s writing and possible thesis statements. All students reread the entry and discuss possible thesis statements. Suggested thesis statements are recorded. Students are rereading entries to select seed ideas that they can draft and revise into thesis statements. Students continue to reread their notebooks for an anecdote or small story that could also develop into a thesis statement.
Lucy Calkins Units of Study Essay Writing Book 3 Lesson # 7 Boxes and Bullets: Framing Essays This session doesn t follow the typical writing workshop timeline. The minilesson is longer, with time for work interspersed during the instruction. 1-25 Teaching Point: Writers frame their writing before they draft. Show students that writers use their thesis statement to plan possible sections of their writing. Model for students how to plan out boxes (thesis statement) and bullets (sections of writing). Listen in and provide feedback about student thinking. Interject in order to provide lift to their thinking. Make sure children are repeating the stem when creating the categories for elaboration. Students use a whole class essay to practice elaboration by repeating the stem of the thesis statement and adding on to create a category or section for the essay. Share a student s thinking with the whole class utilizing a teacher chart that was created with the student s idea. Add in words such as One reason, Another reason, and Finally to the student s stems. 25-50 Work with students in the meeting area to create a framework for their essays based on their thesis statements. 50-60 Mid Workshop Teaching Point: Showing students an alternate way to frame thesis. Writers sometimes think of different kinds to support a thesis. (different kinds of bikes, different kinds of candy, etc) /Share Show students that sometimes if a thesis statement is hard to support sometimes it needs to be revised. Share work that a student has done to revise a thesis that was hard to support. Students are using thesis statements from session 6 and creating a framework using the Boxes and Bullets strategy in order to elaborate. Students reread and think about their thesis statements. They decide if they want to revise it and discuss this with a partner.
Lucy Calkins Units of Study Essay Writing Book 3 Lesson # 8 Learning to Outgrow a First Thesis **This is a lesson on a sophisticated skill. Lucy Calkins states, If you are teaching inexperienced writers, you may decide to detour around this minilesson, saving it for next year. You may use this strategy lesson for only your more agile writers. ** Teaching Point: Writers free write and ask questions about their writing in an effort to outgrow early drafts of a thesis statement. Tell students a story about a writer who finished and essay and thought there may still be more to write. Explain that this writer took the risk of revising a finished text. Explain that sometimes a writer will postpone closure on an essay to revise and make changes. The writing becomes stronger when a writer chooses to do this. Show evidence from a student writer that revision created a stronger piece of writing. Direct student discussion regarding revision strategies. Create a list of things that the student writer did to revise and make the writing stronger. Informally monitoring students and conferring about their work to develop a clearer thesis. Mid-workshop Teaching Point: Share with students an example of how a writer postponed closure to make revisions. Encourage this work. Show students how to organize what they want to say about their essays using their fingers. (Saying your thesis, then listing the supporting ideas across your fingers, elaborating on each idea) Students work in whole group and partners to identify what the student writer did to revise. The revision strategies and skills are named by students and reinforced by the teacher. Students continue to work on essays based on their theses. Students may put aside the thesis to free write about a topic, searching for a clearer thesis. Students share their essays with a partner using the strategy taught by the teacher.
Lucy Calkins Units of Study Essay Writing Book 3 Lesson # 9 Composing and Sorting Mini-Stories Minutes Teacher Behavior Teaching Point: Writers angle and unpack the writing they have done to support their main idea. Remind students that the boxes and bullets they created in earlier lessons provide the framework for their essays. Now they will work on a strategy to provide support to the framework. Provide an example of filling in the frame of an essay using file folders to organize ideas. Show students how to write the thesis on a colored file folder and each supporting idea on a plain folder. Demonstrate how to generate mini stories that support thesis ideas. Model thinking about these stories and generate several stories. Recall the process of writing stories and quickly draft a story that can be used in a supporting idea. Have students write stories in the air that can be embedded into the whole class essay. Listen in and interject to lift thinking while students write in the air. Help any student that is still struggling with the thesis statement/supporting idea framework. Help students gather stories to support their ideas and help them manipulate the system for organizing these stories. Mid-workshop Teaching Point: Share an insight with the whole class that a child has come to regarding angling a story to fit a supporting idea. Choose a student to share that has Students work with partners to write stories in the air that can be embedded into the whole class essay. Students continue to work on creating the framework for an essay. Once this is complete, students will start gathering stories for use in supporting the ideas. Students participate in the
written/angled a story for use in supporting an idea. Introduce a chart that students can use to help write supporting stories for essays. share and then assess their own writing using the Guidelines for Supporting Stories.
Lucy Calkins Units of Study Essay Writing Book 3 Lesson # 10 Seeking Outside Sources Minutes Teacher Behavior Teaching Point: Writers seek outside sources, soliciting other people s stories, to support their ideas in essay writing. Remind students that authors collect, angle, and revise stories to highlight ideas in essays. Show students, by presenting an example, how outside sources can support their essay writing. Illustrate this by showing a piece of writing and an outside source that would support the thesis statement. Students think about outside sources that could add support to the thesis statement. These ideas are shared with the whole class. Support all the learning that has occurred the last several sessions by monitoring student work. Make notes of student progress and challenges that they are facing. Mid-workshop Teaching Point: Review with the students the writing skill of showing and not telling Review angling a story to support the thesis statement and have selected students share their work. Students may collect/angle outside sources or angle their own stories to support the theses statement and the essay ideas. Students participate in the share and then work with a partner to check to see if their stories support the thesis statement.
Lucy Calkins Units of Study Essay Writing Book 3 Lesson # 11 Creating Parallelism in Lists Minutes Teacher Behavior Teaching Point: Writers can structure information to support a claim in the same way again and again. This is parallelism Remind students that authors collect material, especially stories, to use in their essays. Use a well know piece of literature, or speech (I Have a Dream) to illustrate how lists and parallelism can help structure an essay. Use excerpts of the speech to show how a list of closely related ideas can create parallelism in writing. Use a second excerpt of the speech for students to identify the tight list that is occurring. Students work with a partner, and the second speech excerpt, to name what King was doing in his speech. Then they work with their partners to devise a tight list that could be used in a whole class essay. Support all the learning that has occurred the last several sessions by monitoring student work. Make notes of student progress and challenges that they are facing. Mid-workshop Teaching Point: Use student work to show the correlation between stories in essays to tight lists in essays. This will help students that are struggling with the repeated list see it in a different light. Address a challenge that many of your students are facing right now. Name the challenge and have students share ways to overcome it. Students may collect/angle outside sources or angle their own stories to support the theses statement and the essay ideas. The may also be creating tight lists to insert into their essays. Students participate in the share and provide feedback of how to overcome this challenge
Lucy Calkins Units of Study Essay Writing Book 3 Lesson # 12 Revising Towards Honesty Teaching Point: Writers strive to tell the truth, even when inventing what happened. Provide an example to students of an anecdote or story from your own writing life when you revised for honesty. If you don t have your own example you can find anecdotes from writers like Calkins, Fletcher, etc. Walk students through why revising this for honestly makes the writing more authentic. Provide examples of student writing. Ask students to pretend like this is their own writing and have them ask themselves Does this say the exact and precise truth of what I want to say? Informally monitoring students and conferring about ideas and student work. Mid-workshop Teaching Point: Celebrating writers who are telling the truth. Share samples of honest writing and revising from student work with the class. Share the story of a child who checked to see if her story supported her claim and found that it didn t. Engage the students in discussion about this child and what ramifications this had for her writing. Students question whether sample passages pass the truth test. If not, they rewrite these passages to make them more honest. Students share with partners how they revised the sample passages. Students continue essays, generate lists, collect stories, etc in their notebooks. Students reread their writing, trying to find a spot that could be more honest and then rewrite this portion. Students discuss honest writing with partners and what to do when changes need to be made for the writing to be more honest.
Lucy Calkins Units of Study Essay Writing Book 3 Lesson # 13 Gathering a Variety of Information Teaching Point: Writers gather a variety of information to assemble into their work. Explore with the students how you gather information for inclusion into your folders. Point out that one of your folders is fairly empty and you want to collect stories to fill it. Walk students through how you collected information for this folder from observations, interviews, and memories. Return to the whole class essay from prior in the unit. Ask students to collect observations, questions, and statistics for this essay. Make sure to provide scaffolded support for the students during the active engagement. Monitor their work closely to see if they need support. Informally monitoring students and conferring about ideas and student work. Mid-workshop Teaching Point: Using evidence from books. Demonstrate for students how characters, events, or plots from a story can be used as evidence in supporting a thesis. Create a chart of examples from students who have used different types of information while assembling their essays. Point out methods of evidence gathering such as statistics, surveys, researched facts, etc. Students work with partners to write entries in the air. Partner one creates an observation of a moment. Partner 2 creates questions that he/she would write down. Students continue essays, generate lists, collect stories, etc in their notebooks. They should be evaluating whether they have enough material to support a thesis. Students share with partners what type of information they have been gathering.
Lucy Calkins Units of Study Essay Writing Book 3 Lesson # 14 Organizing for Drafting Teaching Point: Writers take their collected files of writing and transform them into drafts by organizing and piecing them together. Show students how to piece together multiple pieces of evidence to support a thesis claim and write an essay. Share with students the chart that contains questions to ask of evidence. Demonstrate how to think analytically about pieces of evidence and if they will be beneficial in supporting your claim. Informally monitoring students and conferring about ideas and student work. Mid-workshop Teaching Point: Explain to students that the writing generated by a folder of work will often be drafted into multiple paragraphs. Students need not be worried about the length of the stories, lists, etc that they choose to include. Facilitate students sharing a folder s contents (gathered evidence for their essay) to a small group. Debrief with students how the speaker shared many things with the group. Some were more vital than others. These more vital pieces are the ones that should be included in the draft essay. Students practice questioning evidence for inclusion in an essay using another example from the teacher s folder. Students manipulate the evidence and make decisions about where it belongs in the essay. Students analyze and sort the evidence they have collected in their files. They also organize the evidence into the order it will occur in the essay. Selected students share a folder s contents (gathered evidence for their essay) to a small group..
Lucy Calkins Units of Study Essay Writing Book 3 Lesson # 15 Building a Cohesive Draft Minutes Teacher Behavior Teaching Point: Demonstrate that you choose a logical way to sequence materials with in a single category. Restate the building metaphor to help students imagine their essays as materials, arranged in a structure. Remind students that they are in charge of deciding what materials go together and why. Tell students that we organize in two ways: 1. Choosing what goes together 2. Using transition words and key words from our thesis to connect ideas together. Demonstrate how you read a piece of data from your collection an decide where it belongs (read/think aloud). Show that you go through the following steps: 1. Laid it out 2. Reread it 3. Thought bout how the bits related 4. Determined the impression you want to give the reader. 5. Decide what order to go in. Students observe the teacher modeling their organizational choices. Mid-workshop Teaching Point: Lining up materials according to importance. Teach students that another way writers organize is by listing their information in order of importance. Use transition words such as: first, building on that point, more important, most importantly. Address a challenge that many of your Students work alone or with a partner to determine the order and categories of their information. Remind students to use transition words as cement to hold their ideas together. Students participate in the
students are facing right now. Name the challenge and have students share ways to overcome it. share and provide feedback of how to overcome this challenge.
Lucy Calkins Units of Study Essay Writing Book 3 Lesson # 16 Writing Introductions and Conclusions Minutes Teacher Behavior Teaching Point: Writers use several phrases to help us create introductions and conclusions for essays. Remind students what they have already learned about essay writing: 1. Gathering ideas from real life 2. Use prompts to push ourselves and extend thinking. 3. Writers form an image of what we want to write 4. Organized ideas into categories and used transition words. Teach students that at the beginning and end of essays, essayists often rely on some common ways to say, This is important Reveal charts from pages 197 & 198 and discuss with students. Students the teacher and discuss the merit of the different introductions and conclusions as they relate to the needs of the teacher s model essays. Ask students to try out some of the introductory phrases to frame their own essays. Mid-workshop Teaching Point: revising introductions. Read examples of how one student wrote an introduction in multiple ways. Tell students that a thesis is sometimes told in a ministory, not in just one sentence. Share the introductions of students who illustrated their theses in a story. Students write 3 introductions and conclusions using the frames from the lists. Students discuss how the stories illustrate the theses.