Comment Week

This week I have the first drafts of our Cynthia Rylant writing projects.  All week long I will be making comments on the writing.  Next Monday the students will get back their first draft along with a page of comments.  I hope that the students will use these comments to make their projects even better than the amazing first drafts that I have been reading.

While we are taking a week away from our writing projects, I thought we could talk a bit more about claims.  We have done a bit of making claims this year.  We started the year with our back to school claim and we have made claims about the best candy and we have made claims while writing book reviews and a few other small claim ideas.  This week I wanted to look at cartoons and see if we could find claims.  

These are the cartoons that we looked at today.  When we looked at the cartoons I just asked the class to tell me what they see.  Then I asked the groups to think about what the author was claiming.  As usual I was amazed by some of the answers.  The answers that I heard proved that the class could definitely understand the claims that these authors were making.

Our next step was to ask the class to tell me what they noticed about the cartoons.  The class quickly came up with a list that included:

• They all made a claim/had a message
• They did not have a lot of text
• You had to infer the claim
• The picture helped tell the story

When it was time to write, I told the class they could try to make their own cartoon.  A few students stepped up to the challenge.  One of my favorite cartoons made a claim about the Big Ten.  The cartoon had a huge logo for the ACC and the SEC and then a tiny logo for the Big 10.  The Big Ten logo had the text, "We want to be Big too."  Perfect and Funny!!

We are going to continue to look at cartoons this week and then have the students experiment by making their own cartoon.