Informational Writing - Red Eyed Tree Frog

We've been working on informational writing for the past week or so, and today I taught a mini lesson. Here is the process in images...

First, we read a big book called Red-Eyed Tree Frog. Then, we decided to write about it! I created this chart with the kiddos. As I wrote, they tried to guess what words I was about to write and chanted them out loud. They thought it was hilarious...although I'm not quite sure why... 

Gotta love 6 & 7 year olds!

I picked a few students to write example sentences on Post Its for each part of an informational writing piece: introduction, key details, and closure. They then came up and put their Post Its on the chart.

We read all of the Post Its and talked about why some were "super duper" and why others needed a tiny bit of fixing. Then we put them in order. Other volunteers came up to write those Post It sentences onto our chart paper. We used different colors to color code our paragraph into three parts. These parts matched our anchor chart.

 Believe me. Give a scented marker to a kid, and BAM instant hard work!

 And of course I needed some form of assessment at the end of the day, so my students completed an informational writing piece about the red eyed tree frog. Here is one piece of hard, hard, hard work. I'm so proud of them!

Grab this writing freebie here!

And of course, we had to make some little frogs to match! This craft was made using this free printable tree frog from Learn Create Love.

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This writing assignment is part of our unit on the rainforest. We practiced close reading using these passages while we learned about the different forest layers.

At the end of the week, my students were asked to write about the emergent layer. I explained the importance of looking back to our anchor chart to make sure that all three parts (intro, details, conclusion) of their writing were included. Two samples of students at different levels are shown below. Click here to see a preview of this rainforest unit!