Writing

 

 Non-fiction Feature Article

In this unit, students will work towards creating well-structured, well-elaborated, engaging feature articles. They will choose a topic of interest and collect relevant book and online resources. During reading workshop, they will read widely about their chosen topic to learn content and they will be taught research strategies to allow them to gather relevant information to use within their own writing. They will express their understanding of the new content with the intention of teaching others about what they know and learn about using text structures and features to organise and give information. When publishing, students will use Google Templates, so that they can share their articles with peers and comment on one another's work.

Key questions:

• How does punctuation help a writer communicate?
• How can writers use internal punctuation to communicate?
• How can we structure our feature article so that we can teach readers about our topic?
• How do text features teach readers?
• How can organisational features in feature articles support readers and writers?

Children will be introduced to a range of different types of non-fiction text and how information is organised differently within them.

A typical mini-lesson flipchart- this one above focuses on how different non-fiction texts share their information in a variety of ways.

At all times, students will be encouraged to stay focused on a particular angle, or sub-topic. This means that rather than writing an "all about Tim Berners-Lee" article (for example), children focus on a particular aspect of his life and work that they find fascinating, such as how the internet has had a positive impact on society. This in turn would lead to an article about how the internet has changed the way children learn in the modern world- a look at the transformative power of the world wide web on education. Other examples would look at changemakers and the things they have achieved to bring about better, fairer societies.

In this student example below, the focus is the work done by a Kenyan environmentalist and women's rights advocate. The angle is all to do with how determination and a conviction that democracy, peace and environmental regeneration can go hand in hand, leading to the birth of the Green Belt movement in Kenya.

Next unit... Research based argument essay.