The First Informational Writing Unit for Beginning Writers

The First Informational Writing Unit for Beginning Writers

Hey, y'all! Each quarter in first grade, we rotate through three writing units: narrative, opinion, and informational. At the beginning of the year, in narrative, we go over basics like complete sentences, story structure, etc. Then, in opinion, we learn the difference between facts and opinions and how to write a simple opinion essay. Our last unit for the first quarter is informational. 

At the beginning of the year, we usually are learning about things related to fall--leaves, seasons, bats, apples, pumpkins, you get it. So we can easily tie our writing into our science unit. What we are learning about becomes our writing topic for this first shared writing experience. 

We kick off the unit by working to expand some simple sentences. My beginning writers are great at sentences like, "Bats can fly." But we want to nudge them to do just a little bit more. "Bats can fly at night," is a great beginning expansion sentence. "Bats can fly at night with echolocation," is even better. Not all of my littles will be there at this point in the school year, but encouraging them to add just a little bit more, and showing them how a simple addition can make a huge impact, will do wonders for their writing. 

Now, if you're studying something like we talked about above, there's no need to do this step twice. But if you need a couple of days to learn together about a topic and take notes, now's the time. We practice note taking over 1-2 days, then we take some time to sort our notes into groups. For instance, if you're learning about apples at this time, your categories may be: types, life cycles, plant needs, ways to eat, etc. I wouldn't do more than 3-4 categories for young writers. It's too overwhelming for them. 

But once you've got some notes and got them sorted into like groups, we can start to work on creating topic sentences and expanding sentences using our own notes. We spend a day or two on topic sentences first. I like to write 3 or so options and let the kids choose the one they want to use in their own final copies. 

Then, we spend a day or two expanding sentences from our notes together, and the kids take over after that. When they're all set, they put it together into final drafts. 

This unit has 11 lessons in total, but may take more than three weeks to complete depending on strong your writers are and how much support they need. If you have to do this entire unit together without handing over sentence expansion to them to do on their own, that's okay. The point is that they have seen how it's done and are on the road to doing it themselves in the next unit. 

Each of these writing units includes a full set of lesson plans, teaching slides, and printables, so you'll have everything you need to get started successfully. You can find the full unit here in my TPT store. While you're there, be sure to follow me on TPT. I'm always adding new things and doing updates and you won't want to miss anything. 

I hoped this helped you get a head start on your next writing unit. Thanks for stopping by and I hope you have a wonderful week. I'll talk to you soon.  

Stay cozy,