Two posts ago, I introduced Graff/Birkenstein’s two-paragraph They Say / I Say template I’ve been requiring my students to use in response to our argumentative Articles of the Week (and, by the way, articles of the week are the original idea of Kelly Gallagher). And as a disclaimer, I’m about to nerd out pretty heavily on […]
argumentative writing
A Simple, Two-Paragraph Template that Helps Kids to Really Argue
In the last post, I shared the new argumentative focus I’m experimenting with for the article of the week (AoW) assignment. Rather than choosing just any type of article, I’m looking for articles that argue. [1] It’s not exactly the discovery of the polio vaccine, but still, it’s pretty cool. I like this new focus […]
Video: One Way to Rock Out CCSS-Friendly, In-class Debates
In this video, I walk through how I went about preparing for and carrying out our second in-class debate of the school year. Why spend time debating? Debates are very CCSS friendly — they make argumentative writing (W.CCR.1) a lot easier, they require collaboration (SL.CCR.1), evaluation (SL.CCR.3), clarity (SL.CCR.4), and it’s super awesome when they […]