Week 10 - Writing How To Books

Students have started on a new course for writing -- How To Books.  We began this week by doing an oral practice for giving instructions.  Students worked with a partner and attempted to verbally tell them how to create the same shape they had.  The catch was they couldn't see each other and had to do it all with words!! Afterwards we had a great discussion on how you had to give EXACT and CLEAR  directions for the project to work!  From there we looked at a variety of How To Books to see what important information we needed to include and discussed how the author uses pictures as well as words to explain.

Our class "How To Make a Peanut Butter Sandwich"

Our next step was to write a How To book together.  We choose to write about how to do the reading center "Read to Self".  Students then went on to write their own How To Book - a book explaining how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  I told them that I would use their exact instructions the next day to make a sandwich for them and to make sure they told me everything I need to do.  Of course when it came time to read and follow their instructions we found that many of them forgot important details (such as to use a knife!) and it resulted in a few minor problems for sandwich making!  All and all it was a fun experiment and helped the students to understand the importance of being exact and explaining ALL of the steps.  After we tried out a few of their instructions we worked together to write clearer instructions to follow.  I then used those instructions to make a sandwich for each of them.  This next week they will choose something that they know how to do and write their own How To book.  I can't wait to read them!

Jonas did the best job of creating a How To book for sandwich making!

Have a super week,
Mrs. Heath