Defend Yourself Friday Idea. We’ve been hearing about the Common Core shift toward more argumentative writing.
David Coleman, architect of the ELA standards, himself says we should expect students to “read like detectives” and “write like investigative reports” by either dissecting the arguments in a text and using the claims made to support those arguments or establishing an original argument and using texts to support it. Russ Goerend, a 6th grade teacher in Iowa, uses a writing strategy called “Defend Yourself Fridays” as a fun, informal method to get students in the habit of making and defending an argument. This post was originally posted by Russ Goerend at russgoerend.com: Image: koratmember / FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Use to build prior knowledge and incorporate more NF. Part of the reason my students have such a hard time reading is because they bring little prior knowledge and background to the written page.
They can decode the words, but the words remain meaningless without a foundation of knowledge. To help build my students’ prior knowledge, I assign them an "Article of the Week" every Monday morning. By the end of the school year I want them to have read 35 to 40 articles about what is going on in the world. Brevity: A Journal of Concise Lit NF.