Writing With a Purpose in Mind

Learning Targets for Writing This Week:  
I can brainstorm ideas and details before writing.
I can connect ideas and details to the purpose for writing.

This week we have continued to work on thinking about our purpose and narrowing our topic before we begin any writing.  We used the analogy of a funnel to visualize narrowing our topic.  For example, the topic animals is too large and will not fit through our funnel, but frogs does fit.  After we had our topic we began to select the details and ideas we would include in our paper, depending on our audience.  We will continue to practice brainstorming ideas and details and focusing on our purpose prior to writing.

Writing

Last week in writing we discussed the importance of "RAFT" or identifying the Role of the writer, thinking about what our Audience will be for our writing. We talked about possible formats for our writing (a narrative essay, a letter, a research paper, a fairy tale, etc.) and we also discussed the importance of carefully examining the Topic before we even start brainstorming for our writing. We completed a couple of fun writing pieces to practice the steps of RAFT.   In addition, we completed our fall district writing assessment and our fall MAP tests.