Writing-Wednesday Persuasive Piece

We made it through the middle of the week! Hooray!

All of my classes did a tremendous job with the writing piece today. I asked how many students had ever encountered a teacher that told them they needed to write an essay and it needed to have these certain parts. The majority of my students raised their hands. I then asked my students to keep their hands raised if they ever had a teacher who had given them this assignment, yet didn’t adequately guide or show a clear path for meeting the expectations for this essay. All hands remained raised. That made me sad.

SO! In an attempt to build strong writers (even in a science class!), I guided my students through writing a persuasive writing paragraph. We have been discussing mixtures over the past week so it was fitting to write a piece related to that topic! A link to our class Prezi used for the writing can be found here.

First students introduced both mixtures and then asserted their opinion on whether the mixture presented was heterogeneous or homogeneous.

Next they provided 3 pieces of evidence to support their opinion. Students referenced their foldable (from p. 9 in our notebook – see the post here), as well as their Common Core reading on mixtures (see that post here).

Then students wrote a summary/conclusion sentence to tie everything together.

Finally, students read their paragraphs aloud to themselves, made revisions to their piece, and wrote their final draft to turn in to their class bin.

The writing I have seen so far is a tremendous turn around from what I saw the first and second Wednesdays of school!

After the writing piece, students completed the Mixtures & Separation Pre-Lab Questions (which can be found here: Mixtures and Separation Pre-Lab Questions). These must submitted prior to participating in lab! If a student was absent today s/he will be expected to complete the questions IN CLASS, before beginning the lab. You may reference the Common Core reading (see link above) for a resource to answer questions.

Below is a sneak peak at our Separation of Mixtures Lab for tomorrow! 🙂 I’m excited!

See you soon,

Follow:

0

Meredith

Meredith is a National Board Certified Teacher and has been teaching middle grades science for over a decade. She enjoys all science curricula but life sciences are her passion. She loves creativity and organization and feels at her best in the classroom when she can infuse these aspects into her lessons to help set up her students for success.