To help us think about what makes for a persuasive and effective argument, we explored 6 strategies along with sentence stems that can help us begin to write our supporting paragraphs to defend and explain our thesis. Many of these are connected with each other and they have become the lens in which we read and analyze other famous speeches. Here they are explained:
Kairos (Greek for opportunity) - Try and convince your audience the issue is so important that they must act NOW! Research - Using reliable research can help your argument be convincing. Ethos (Greek for "character") - If people believe and trust in you, you're more likely to persuade them. Pathos (Greek for "suffering" or "experience") - Getting people to feel happy, sad, or angry can help your argument. Big Names - Important people or experts can make your argument seem more convincing. Logos (Greek for "word") - Facts, numbers, and information can be very convincing! Finding our Thesis:Last week we took our opinion and turned it into our clearly and confidently stated thesis! We then turned our attention to identifying the thesis of other speeches and persuasive writing to help us become familiar and understand the importance of a strongly stated opinion in our writing. Next steps we are going to listen to, and read various famous speeches given by various North Americans, from Chief Sealth, to Sojourner Truth, to Martin Luther King Jr. to John F. Kennedy. Our goal is to notice and learn how such orators crafted and gave their speeches that moved the audience towards change! This is one of my favorite lessons as each of these amazing individuals from history have such a strong and unique voice worth learning from! Our next Writing unit is Persuasive Writing! Already we have begun to dig into the unit by discussing what Opinions that Matter and how Opinion Writing can be a platform for meaningful change in our world! I am so excited as we select a topic for our Writing that we are passionate about and work towards crafting a strong persuasive writing piece that we will eventually present to the class! This is also a wonderful opportunity to practice presentation skills when the time comes as well. Our next steps include crafting a strong thesis, and organizing the arguments we hope to use to support our thesis. The next step in our Informational Writing has lead us to researching and finding out more on our migration topic. To help us when we find interesting or meaningful articles, websites, and books to aid our research, we took two days to really dive into quotes, paraphrasing, and summarizing as 3 tools to avoid plagiarism and give credit to the hard work of others. More specifically, we broke down paraphrasing into 3 steps and did our best to practice both orally and in our writing. It is a tough skill! They even quizzed me by reading 2 sentences from an article and had me try to paraphrase it into one! Hopefully we can plant some strong researching skills to help them navigate and learn effectively and efficiently around a topic of choice!
After getting our feet wet with exploring some migration topics in the Fall, we are jumping right back in this Spring, tying our Informational Writing unit to our migration PBL! Upon selecting a migration topic, we will begin to plan, write and eventually create a book or brochure as an migration expert! The first few steps involve the many different ways we can plan and organize our writing into subtopics, using an outline, cause and effect chart, pro and con chart, or mind map. My personal favorite is the mind map as it shows how different subtopics and ideas can be interconnected! Next steps will be writing a hook to grab the reader's attention using questions, visualization, an interesting fact, or perhaps a letter to the reader! Turning Our Planning into an Intro!We are sadly finishing up our Poetry Unit (it truly is one of my favorites to teach) and are beginning to prepare and practice for our upcoming Poetry Slam! Wednesday, February 25th we will have our very own Poetry Slam where we will present a few selected poems from our Poetry Compilation Books! Leading up to this point, I used a PowerPoint to help build on both our figurative language tools to use in our poetry while also present and explore various other new types of poems to the class to try out! Check out the slides below and preview the types of poems you might hear on Wednesday!
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June 2015
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