Informational Text

Get it Done! Writing and Analyzing Informational Texts to Make Things Happen by Wilhelm, Smith, and Fredricksen

Say:
     One of the biggest problems I have with telling people that I am in the process of becoming an English teacher is that inevitably they look at me and say something along the lines of, "WHY?" There is a mindset that has permeated our culture of people thinking that the only disciplines that matter are science and math.  Writing an essay will not make the newest IPhone come out, and what did we really learn from reading The Pearl in ninth grade anyway?  Writing informational texts is a perfect example of how and why we still need to spend time teaching English to all students.  On page four our authors say, "Every discipline uses these thought patterns extensively, so if we are going to help students think like real readers, writers, historians, scientists, and mathematicians, we need to teach these patterns and text structures in the context of our subject matter." In any career, classroom, or even general conversation, people need to be able to give other people facts.  This can either be to inform, or as we have learned from our class last week to argue.  Informational texts offer up the basis of our warrants and backing when we are getting into an argument.  As always, our three authors end our introduction by discussing how these lessons adhere to the Common Core State Standards.
     Chapter five of Get it Done! offers some insight on something that I am aware of, but that I haven't really had the chance to use often enough. Essential questions.  I was recently working with Julian on our class log for Vic's class and I was working on writing a purpose.  When I asked him what he thought, he said that he usually just puts in essential questions to guide the lesson.  Wilhelm, Smith, and Fredricksen also present Essential questions as a way to organize a unit.  I like this idea of beginning with a text and then thinking about what the important questions are relating to it.  What do we want students to get out of reading this text?  Essential questions interest me for two reasons. If you are in a school where you are being required to teach a text, it gives you something to look for when planning a unit.  If you get to choose your own text to teach, it gives you the chance to look for something happening outside of the classroom to think of something you would want your students to think about and then to find a text that would begin answering these questions. This of course also ties back into transactional theory because students will be not just reading texts to learn about English, but to think about them in a way that connects to their own lives and the world around them.
     Chapters six through twelve go through each of the different types of informational texts.  These different forms of informational text all seem to be self explanatory based off their names.  The first form is naming and listing.  This form asks students to look into real world settings and have them find different lists of things they see.  One of the easiest ways is to have students look at top ten lists and then move them into logging information into lists and having them categorize data.  Summarizing is another form, and I think that this would be a good way to get students interacting with texts because it allows students to look at an informational text and think through it in order to tell us what it says.    

Do:
Today, I really lucked out for this Say/Do.  I did my observation of another teacher at my internship today and that teacher just happened to be going over informational texts with her students.  The way she did this was really cool because they had already learned about argumentative writing the year before, so she started with that and then taught writing informational text in the context of argument.  This allowed students to think about information and facts as a way to strengthen their arguments as they move into their final unit assignment of writing and argumentative essay.  So, what happened today consisted of looking at one argumentative essay and one explanatory essay and having students think about the differences without discussing anything beforehand.  They then looked at writing prompts for each essay and filled in a venn diagram with the differences in structure of the essay prompts.

Argument vs. Explanatory Essay