Argument writing is always a challenging unit for 5th grade. A lot of the kids love to argue but they have a hard time defending their argument with solid evidence. In this unit, students are asked to write an argument piece regarding debatable issues. When we introduced this idea, the students immediately got fired up and had very strong opinions about a lot of different issues.
The most difficult part of this unit is to get them to defend their claim or opinion using research, and also analyzing that research to best support their reasons. We started by stating a claim and giving three reasons to support that claim. Then the students started to draft based on their knowledge of the topic and articles that we read as a class. A lot of the students were easily able to give their reasons and provide research-based evidence to defend them, but the struggle came when we asked them to analyze the evidence and explain their thinking to create a more powerful voice to their writing. In order to do this, the students have to consider a few things: Why did I include this evidence? How does this evidence relate back to my claim? What makes this evidence so important?
Here is a sample of a 5th grader's writing notebook. It is amazing to see the way their brains work and how they organize, draft, and revise their pieces. We have used several different thinking maps to organize our ideas and help determine the text structure we should use in our writing.
Although we are only approaching the second bend in this unit, we have seen some tremendous work from our kids. The next step to take in our writing is to consider counter-arguments that will help enhance our arguments.
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