How to Write an Informational Text Essay Writing for Young Learners

Hello everyone and welcome back to the language arts gallery. Today we're going to continue with our writing for young learners and we're going to talk about writing research reports with third and fourth grade students. So we're going to talk today about writing research report on famous landmark. like this topic because think it pairs really well with lots of different social studies topics. It also pairs really well with informational text that we might cover in reading workshop. So think this is great genre of writing to include in your writing workshop alongside of those lessons. And think this also meets standards related toformational text. So begin my lesson by talking little bit about what landmarks are. Now, one thing like to do in my lessons is help my students to understand that it's okay to write about famous landmarks, and most of my students do write about famous landmarks, but it's also okay to write about landmarks in your own neighborhood. lot of students like to do that because it's easy for them to write about because they have real world knowledge of it. So, landmark is just something that helps us to recognize place. It can tell us about the history, the culture, or the beauty of place. Now, landmarks can be natural or they can be man-made. natural landmark, of course, is made by nature. And usually go over some examples of this with my students. The Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, Mount Everest. and students will often talk about natural landmarks in their town. And this can be something like famous lake or perhaps famous mountain in their town. Landmarks can also be built by people. And these are the types of landmarks that most students are familiar with, particularly when we're talking about third and fourth graders. And we've got some examples here. The Statue of Liberty, the Great Wall of China, the Eiffel Tower, and the list goes on and on. so again it's important to talk to the students that we're not just covering landmarks that are famous around the world but these are landmarks that can be famous within their town. So how can we learn about these different types of landmarks? Well, we can go to the library. We can search online. We can ask teacher or we can ask an expert on the topic. we can read about it either in book, newspaper or magazine. And we're going to take all this information, we're going to put it together, and we're going to share it with our audience in the form of research report. When we gather information, as hopefully our students have done at this point, and we share it with others, this is called writing research report. So, what are topics people can write research reports about? Well, many different topics. We can of course write about famous landmarks, but we can also write about plants, historical events, countries, people, weather, or animals. We're going to write about famous landmarks. And in order to do that, we need to go over the steps in writing research report. So, brainstormed or gave some exemplars of famous natural and man-made landmarks. And here I've got three famous man-made landmarks. The Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Great Pyramids in Egypt, and the Statue of Liberty. So, going over this the features of this genre, research report's written about one topic. It's got one main idea. The author should tell us that main idea in the introduction. body paragraphs should tell more about the main idea and we want to end with conclusion. So, let's go through the steps in writing great research report. First, we want to choose topic, right? this doesn't have to be specific, but it should be something that we're interested in. So, we've had this topic assigned to us. We're writing about famous landmarks. We want to focus that little bit more and we want to choose one particular landmark. So, we're going to write, for example, about the Statue of Liberty. Now, don't know there's there's lot of different ways can go with this topic. don't know exactly where I'm going to go just yet, but I've chosen the Statue of Liberty, and now I'm going to go to my second step, and that's going to help me to narrow down what I'm going to write about. am going to gather information. So, we said we can look for information in textbooks online, by talking to teacher, or by going to the library. So, after we gather all this information, we want to organize it. So, we're putting it in an order that makes sense. And we're going to look at graphic organizer and how that can help us as we're writing our research report. So for our report, we want to look at three aspects of our famous landmark. So do this to scaffold the writing for the students because third graders, even fourth graders, think they need little bit more support. think if you just throw them in the deep end and say, "Okay, write research report about famous landmark." And they've got to come up with these different ideas, this really chunks the project. So, this is essentially telling student, write one paragraph about what the Statue of Liberty looks like. Write second paragraph about where the Statue of Liberty is located. Write third paragraph about why it's famous. And then the students are taking each of these individual building blocks and then hopefully they're putting them together into the essay scene where each one fits. And this is going to move our students towards more independent writing in future. So, now that we've organized that information, we're going to go ahead and draft it. And I've got template for the students to work with. then we want to encourage our students to go back and to revise and edit. Early on in the first lesson, tell my students, forget about this. Don't worry about spelling. Don't worry about grammar. Get your ideas and the structure of your ideas down on paper. And then finally after that we're going to publish this or present it to our teacher or whoever our audience happens to be. So let's walk through our example. First we're going to choose landmark. We've got several different examples here. the White House, the Eiffel Tower, the MLK Memorial, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Leading Tower of Pisa, and Mount Rushmore. So you can see at this point we've covered about 10 landmarks. So students even if they want to write about something different and some may want to and that's fine. But even if they've got no background knowledge of of what landmark is, they've probably heard of few of these places. Hopefully it's place that interests them. So we've got sort of foundation that these kids can build on as they go forward. Then we're going to ask our students to gather information. This is where they're doing their research. And they're going to have graphic organizer here to help them. And it looks like this. Okay. So, I've got my famous landmarks. What does it look like? Where is it located? And why is it famous or special? So, here is where would break from the carpet. would give these students their graphic organizers. I'd let them go back to their Chromebook or whatever program they're working with. and would have them gather information on this. maybe, setting them up with National Geographic Kids or something like that where they've got, access to information on these different landmarks. So then after that, would bring them back to the carpet and would ask them to share little bit about their landmark. It doesn't have to be very organized at this point. just might ask my students, what does it look like? Where is it located? Why is anus? Now, if you're working with group of students where they're very high level and they can work through this really quickly, you can move right into day two of ourformational writing. But what found is that generally my students the following day. They need refresher where I'll go over the same PPT. would really just go over the research process, where we can get the information, and would stress the three types of information we're looking for. these three body paragraph topics that are listed here. What is your landmark look like? Where is it located? And why is it famous? And would give them second day to complete this because most students, they can complete this organizer in one day. So, break this up into two writing workshops. So, if you found this useful, you can find this resource in my teachers pay teacher store along with all my academic writing resources and that is linked in the video description. And if you haven't already, please remember to like, subscribe, and comment on the video. And will see you in our next video at the language arts gallery.