Opinion Writing

This week in Writing Workshop we have been focusing on how writers make and uncover opinions about their books.  As writers we discussed how writers can study the following components of their books to make their writing stronger:

- characters

- favorite parts

- pictures

- covers

- titles

We also discussed how writers are WIDE AWAKE readers!  Writers need to use details to grow new ideas and to make their stories longer and use more details. One way that writers can add more details to their writing is by rereading their stories. Many students realized that once they went back and reread a part of their book they found new details that they missed the first time!  Students then added those new details to their writing pieces.  Below are some examples of students work!

Today in Writing Workshop students focused on making their writing better by adding more details and evidence from their books. As readers and writers it is important to develop opinions about a book, however, writings have to search for many pieces of evidences to support each of their opinions about the book. As a class we have many opinions about The Iron Giant.  Our opinions about the Iron Giant are:  The Iron Giant is a great book,  the villagers did have a right to lure the Iron Giant into the pit, and the Iron Giant is strong.

Now that we have opinions about the Iron Giant we have to back up our opinion (using evidence from the text).  Below is our class writing pieces about our opinions from the Iron Giant.

We are reading The Iron Giant.  Our class is really enjoying The Iron Giant because you never know what is going to happen next. For example, we did not know that space-bat-angel-dragon was going to come to life!  We are also really enjoying the Iron Giant because it allows the reader to dream!  If we were characters in the Iron Giant many of us would run to the Iron Giant like the villagers did and some of us would hide in our houses like the other villagers did.

On page 29 in The Iron Giant you can see the villagers have dug a pit to trap the Iron Giant.  At first we thought the Iron Giant should have built a pit to trap the Iron Giant because he was eating all of the tractors and metal.  Another reason we thought this at first was because the Iron Giant kept eating all the metal, if he ate all the metal in the town the workers would not have any machines to use to keep the village clean.  However, now we are realizing that maybe the villagers should not have dug a pit and trapped the Iron Giant because they need the Iron Giant to fight the space-bat-angel-dragon.

Another opinion we have of the Iron Giant is that he is very strong.  He is strong because after he fell off a cliff he put his body back together.  Another reason we think he is strong is because he can lift and move cars.

Tomorrow we are going to continue to support our opinions using evidence from the text!