Writing Focus - Feature Articles

Our second writing unit is a more interesting form of informational writing--we are writing feature articles.  This idea came out of some of our teacher sessions with the educational consultant Matt Glover, on teaching writing through inquiry.

We began the unit with an immersion into reading a variety of feature articles,  noticing things they all had in common that made them stand out.  We discovered that this worked best if we read the articles twice--the first time as a reader, just to see what the article was about.  Then we read the article again as a writer, noticing things the author did to catch our attention.

Our feature articles came from a variety of children's magazines, such as Ranger Rick, National Geographic for Kids, Scholastic.  Feature articles become the mentor texts for this unit, and we refer back to them many times throughout the unit.

I worked with each table group of six students.  First we read one article all together, talking about some of the things we noticed.  Then each student read an article and reported back to the table some of the things they "noticed" in their article.  We made a list of all the "noticings", especially when the "noticing" appeared in several of the articles.  While I worked with a group, the other tables were doing some of their reading rotations--one group worked on IDR (Independent Daily Reading) and another group worked on the comprehension activity of the week--finding the main idea.

Some of the things we noticed.  

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In the next mini-lesson, we took a closer look at how the author organized the information.   First we gathered on the carpet as I modeled reading the article and noticing how the information was organized.  (Our lessons on main idea and supporting details really came in handy here!)   Then students went back to their table groups and I gave each table one of the mentor articles to "look closer" at.  Students presented their findings to the class.

My clever students figured out that since they were already doing so much research about biomes for their Unit of Inquiry projects, that it would be a natural fit to have their feature article tie in to that presentation.  I just love it when our Units of Inquiry have a natural fit in several areas, and love it even more when the kids make the connections!