Skip to main content

Argumentative Writing

Last week we began preparing for our next writing type/essay which will be argumentative.  In The Giver, all marriages are arranged, so I thought it would be interesting to pull in some non-fiction about this very topic!  Most students did not know that it even existed!  The first article we read was about why some cultures believe in arranged marriages and why it tends to work well.  This week we will read another article with a different point of view. We also watched a very interesting video clip which showed both sides of this topic.  For both articles, students will mark the text, identify the author's central claim, and analyze the types of evidence used to support the claim.  More specifically, students are learning about rhetorical appeals-ethos, pathos, logos.  To help them understand the types of appeals, we watched a variety of commercials and discussed the method(s) used in each.
Watching a video about ethos, pathos, logos
  After we finish reading all of the articles, students will be practicing argumentative writing using arranged marriage as the topic.  I plan on having them write paragraphs, share them with me through Google, and project them onto the screen so that we can analyze and critique them.  We will also write a few paragraphs together as a class.  In order to prepare them, we will also have a Socratic Seminar on this topic.  
Analyzing evidence in article


Working on quote analysis for The Giver

Love their positive attitudes!

Middle Schoolers ROCK
Working together to find different types of evidence


 All of these activities will lead us to a performance task and argumentative essay about a different topic.  Students will be doing the same kinds of activities in preparation (marking text, identifying central claim, etc).  However, this time they will write the essay without my help.  The topic will be video surveillance (another topic from The Giver).  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TQE: Get students Engaged and Digging Deep

I've mentioned before how Twitter has helped me grow as an educator.  Edutwitter is a valuable resource for book recommendations, new teaching methods, lessons, and articles.  One of my favorite educators to follow is Marissa Thompson, a high school teacher at Carlsbad High. This summer I read about her TQE(thoughts, questions, epiphanies) method for discussing literature.  I'd always longed for having discussions like the ones I had in my college literature courses, but when I try fishbowl or Socratic seminar with my students, the discussions felt forced, flat, and awkward. That changed today when I tried TQE for the first time.  Sharing homework in small groups Students writing their TQEs on the board When I listened to Marissa's podcast on Cult of Pedagogy ( check it out here ), I was intimidated. After all, her students are in high school and have a rock star teacher.  I think I read the transcript twenty times before finally trying it....
6 comments
Read more

Writing an Essay...with a Partner

I love technology for collaboration! Teaching writing to middle school students is not easy.  All students come with different skills and knowledge.  With 35 students in a class, it's impossible to sit down one on one and assist students with the writing process.  Teaching students to write a literary analysis is particularly challenging because most seventh-graders have little, to no experience.  Students need to learn to  develop a thesis statement, find evidence from the text to support it, provide the context of the selected quotations , and write insightful commentary on the evidence they selected. Remember, these kiddos are twelve! Graphic organizers are particularly helpful to these young writers. The biggest challenge is providing feedback to students as they are writing, rather than after they turn their work in for a grade.  Students need to be able to use the feedback they receive and see the difference it makes in the final product.  I...
2 comments
Read more

Mock Trials-Periods 0 and 2

MY Ethan Couch (notice the shirt) Wow!  What a fantastic week it has been for me as a teacher!  My students have been working hard preparing for their assigned cases and getting ready to go to trial.  Each group was assigned a case based on an article we read in class.  One case was about a sixteen-year old  boy named Ethan Couch.  He had a blood alcohol level three times over the legal limit when the car he was driving hit a disabled vehicle and killed four innocent people.  He receive one year of rehabilitation in Malibu and ten years probabtion as his punishment. His attorneys blamed his behavior on what was called "affluenza."  Please ask your child about this word and how it was used to defend him in court! The other case involved for teens who threw an eight pound rock over an overpass and struck the passenger side of a vehicle.  The passenger was Sharon Budd, a middle-school English teacher and breast cancer survivor.  Sh...
27 comments
Read more