Casual Teaching on Year 5; Point of View and Persuasive Writing

Today I had a year 5 class. It's been a long, long, long time since I've taught one of the older grades. I spent 2011 and 2012 on Year 1 and in 2013 I did support on Kindy and Year 1.

I had a great day. I had planned my own work but the teacher had left me work. In the end I'm glad I had my own plans as there was a slight technical glitch and I had to fall back on my own work for part of the day until things were fixed. I'm just going to blog about the lesson I had planned which took up the whole morning session.

I got to use my latest resource which I specifically created for today; a Persuasive Writing Activity Pack. Click on the picture to check it out on TPT :)

We started off this morning with the story Dear Mrs. LaRue: Letters From Obedience School.

This was a great find a couple of year ago. I only paid $2 for it at a book store liquidation sale. For those not familiar with the story, it's about a dog called Ike who is sent to obedience school and writes letters to his owner. His letters are full of exaggeration and pleas for her to take him home. The illustrations are done in a clever way. There are two parts; b&w showing the exaggeration and the coloured ones showing how it really is.

The two types of illustrations provide a great discussion point about why the illustrator would do this and how it helps tell the story. From there, the discussion can easily lead into the topic; Point of View.

We completed a table comparing the point of view of Ike and what the pictures show.

After that students were given the task to write Mrs. LaRue a letter persuading her to come and take the dog home. Students could either be Ike or themselves.

Before sending them off to write, we talked about what a persuasive text was. Then we talked about the structure and what to include in each paragraph. We looked at an example text and looked at the features. Then students were giving a planning sheet to jot down their ideas before writing the letters.

Here are some of the pages that we used from the persuasive writing pack;

Reading their letters was entertaining. I was very impressed with their reasons for collecting Ike. They combined reasons from the story as well as their own ideas.

I would say that this lesson was a success. Students were able to talk about the different points of view presented and were able to write a decent persuasive letter.

The rest of the day was good. Did some place value and got to experiment with circuit boards and light bulbs.