Persuasive Writing

This week, my classes have been learning to write persuasive compositions. They're all pretty good, or at least think they are, at getting what they want, so they're falling into this style of thinking/writing quite naturally. Really, I'm super proud of their efforts and improvement and happy to see results of the changes I've made to my writing instruction this year thanks to a super amazing curriculum coach.

I'll be out of the classroom tomorrow and didn't really feel like writing a lesson plan, so I came up with a creative and/or manipulative way to get maximum student effort/output today with minimal effort/output for me this evening. Hence the time to write about said manipulation.

After writing for 90 seconds on three topics [see attachment], attempting to increase words written with each interval [yes, I take a workout mentality into the classroom as well. Exercise for the brain?], I told the students that those three topics would be the 3 key points they would use to write a paragraph persuading me to allow them to have a movie day tomorrow. We worked as a class to develop an organized outline with individualized elaborations, examples and evidence of each key point and then I let them loose to try and persuade me. If the assignment wasn't completed or following our "Persuasive Writing Guidelines" in order to truly convince me they were worthy of the potential and illustrious "Movie Day", they were threatened with working on a 4 page study guide in a 'Buddy Class' instead. Obviously, I was banking on them all completing the assignment correctly because lord knows I didn't want to be typing up this alleged study guide. Fortunately, they were WAY into it, and this assignment resulted in some absolute gems as far as entertainment value. I'll just attach the pictures and let you discover for yourself. See if you can spot which student was experimenting with a thesaurus....I adore adore adores these kids, perfect paragraph structure or not.

You will probably have to enlarge the screen for the full effect....