It is crucial that you select captivating, well-written mentor texts to support your stu- dents in this work. Choose just a small number of texts that resemble those you hope your children will write in this unit, making the choice not by the topic of the texts but rather with an eye to the structures within which you hope your students will write. For example, a book about the human body with clear sections, varying formats, and writing that fourth graders could potentially see themselves emulating would be more supportive than one about pets that is very complex and far different from the kinds of writing your students will do. Consider whether you want to choose several mentor texts that are structured differently so as to expand students’ sense of options, or whether you want to channel students toward a particular structure so that you can provide more scaffolding by holding the class more closely together and ensuring that the text you write as an exemplar matches the ones they will write. When selecting texts, you will likely find that some texts are narrative nonfiction texts. These might, for example, take readers through a timeline within the life of someone or something (people, animals, plants, rivers, wars, events). Some texts will be expository informa- tional texts that teach all about a topic. Some texts will be nonfiction procedural texts that teach how to accomplish something such as a scientific experiment. Some texts, of course, will be a composite of all of these and other kinds of informational writing. You’ll need to decide which features you’ll want to highlight in your minilessons and make sure the touchstone texts you select illustrate those features. For example, given that you’ll probably emphasize the importance of categorizing information, you’ll want to find model texts that have clear subcategories. You may want to empha-
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size that informational writers write in sections or chapters, and you may want to use the very concrete example of writing that begins with a table of contents and is di- vided into chapters to illustrate this concept—in which case you will need books that contain a table of contents. Whether that is important to you or not, you will almost certainly want to show writers that information pertaining to one subtopic falls under one heading, and information pertaining to another subtopic falls under a second heading, and so you will want to select mentor texts that have headings and subhead- ings, if not chapters and a table of contents. You may decide to highlight the fact that writers integrate facts with opinions and ideas, in which case you’ll want to select mentor texts that illustrate this clearly. You may also search for exemplar texts that blend clear, straightforward informational writing with voice. If so, you’ll want to look for books that engage the reader and sound as if the author is speaking straight to the reader, with sentences embedded among the factual information in which the author relates that information to something more personal.
In the past month’s nonfiction reading workshop, you emphasized the differences between narrative and expository nonfiction reading. You can build on this work by choosing mentor texts that contain some sections that sound more storylike (but are still informational) and some that are more courselike. For example, an information book that deals with the life cycle of a butterfly may contain sections that sound more like a chronological narrative while still incorporating facts, as well as other sections that sound like a lecture.
Once you’ve chosen an exemplar text or two, you’re ready to begin. You’ll want to provide a unit overview for your youngsters. This will be easy to do because in the reading workshop, your children will also be reading texts in which writers become teachers, laying out a course of study for readers. You might, therefore, say: “The au- thors that you are reading are functioning like your teachers. Well, you, too, can be- come a teacher, writing in such a way that you teach other people about the topics on which you are an expert.”
Assessing Informational Writing
You will probably decide to launch the unit with an on-demand informational writing assessment. If you make this decision, we recommend using the same prompt and same conditions as other Reading and Writing Project teachers have used so that you will be in a position to analyze the writing your students produce under the same conditions, referring to the Continuum for Assessing Informational Writing (www .readingandwritingproject.com). This means that on the day before the assessment, you say to your students, “Think of a topic that you’ve studied or know. Tomorrow, you will have an hour to write an informational (or all-about) text that teaches others interesting and important information and ideas about that topic. If you want to find and use information from a book or another outside source, you may bring that with you tomorrow. Please keep in mind that you’ll have an hour to complete this.” Then,
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the following day, provide them with sixty minutes, or one writing workshop, to show what they know about informational writing.
Many teachers find that after they copy what students have done during this infor- mational writing and note where the work falls along the continuum, it can be helpful to give students a fast course on the topic and then allow them to spend a single day rewriting what they have written, from top to bottom, because this can allow you to assess what they know how to do without any instruction and what is easily within their grasp with just a brief amount of reminders.
This on-demand writing will help you know where your students fall in a trajec- tory of writing development and help you set your sights on very clear next steps. It will also help students realize that informational writing is well within their grasp and not something that requires days and weeks of preparation. Most classrooms of stu- dents who have done the on-demand assessment have been pleasantly surprised by how much students bring into this unit of study and by the volume of writing stu- dents are able to produce in just one day’s writing workshop. The work that students produce in the on-demand situation becomes the baseline, and you can increase ex- pectations as the unit progresses.