Writing about our Collections

We had a lot of engagement writing about our collections in Writing Workshop this month. It's been a great introduction to reviews, and opinion writing in general. We: 

• learned to make a careful judgement of the best in our collection by looking closely
• learned to say a lot of reasons why
• learned some strategies for adding details such as writing "For example..." or "I think that because..."
• practiced ways to get our readers' attention in the beginning of a piece
• judged peers' collections as well, and read their opinions, then practiced agreeing and disagreeing respectfully-- and learned some phrases that help us agree/disagree in writing

We then chose our best writing about collections so far, and fixed it up with some first-grade editing and revising. We used checklists to help us check in on what we're each already doing well as an opinion writer, and what we could work on to make our upcoming writing even stronger!