29. Informational Writing Instruction: 3 activities to help your students "read like writers" and improve their informational writing

<p><strong>Do you use literary mentor texts in your classroom?</strong> <span style="font-weight: 400;">This practice has definitely gained popularity, and for good reason, but many of the resources out there offer strategies for using picture books, novels, and poetry as mentor texts for writing. The strategies from literature analysis can be applied to nonfiction sentence structure, but</span> <strong>there are a few easy things you can add to specifically help your students read like writers in informational text. </strong></p> <p><strong>You don’t want to miss:</strong></p> <ul> <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">(4:40) My biggest reason for wanting my students to write with variety and authenticity…spoiler alert, it’s totally selfish!</span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">(7:46) Why sticking to only 5 paragraph essays is doing our students a disservice </span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">(9:23) Activity 1: Dissecting introductions and conclusions for students to determine aspects they might mimic </span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">(13:50) Activity 2: Have students learn about caption cards and informational plaques from museums, and create those about class projects. </span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">(16:30) The cool thing about variety: understanding that one text about a topic cannot cover</span> <em><span style="font-weight: 400;">everything</span></em> <span style="font-weight: 400;">about a topic, and authors have to be intentional! </span></li> <li style="font-weight: 400;" aria-level="1"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">(21:40) Activity 3: Analyze and mimic text features: digging into all the great examples you collected from episode 27 & 28, and finding what they can imitate about their own topics in their own writing </span></li> </ul> <p><s