Disasters! Unit Plan
By Sayuri Stabrowski and Toni Maraviglia
A Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop Month-Long Unit on Natural
Disasters and Frightening Weather with a focus on publishing
Feature Articles and Asking/Answering Questions in Non-Fiction
Texts.
Final Assessment, Writer’s Workshop: SWBAT publish at least one Feature
Article on a natural disaster that includes all of the basic elements of a
Feature Article, including subheadings, an angle/position, a purpose/message,
an introduction and a conclusion, important facts and supporting details,
complete sentences, focused paragraphs, proper sequence, proper comma
punctuation, subject-verb agreement and correct spelling.
Final Assessment, Reader’s Workshop: SWBAT identify and use the features of a
non-fiction informational text for purposes of research by asking questions,
making predictions, differentiating between fact and opinion, identifying
bias, determining importance and finding the author’s purpose. The Reading
portion of the unit ties in to the Writing portion because in order to
produce a Feature Article, students must use their non-fiction texts as
informational gold mines for research.
Launching the Unit (2 days): Students will be immersed in non-fiction
literature about natural disasters in the first part of the unit. Teacher
will read aloud numerous articles about various natural disasters and their
effects on society. Class will begin to share a text, examining the various
features of non-fiction informational texts such as the Table of Contents,
Index, Glossary, Chapter and Sub-headings.
Students will gather ideas for writing by making lists or KWL charts about
what they know about natural disasters, by making word-association webs for a
variety of natural disaster words (eg. volcano, earthquake, hurricane), by
free-writing about natural disasters and personal experience, and by writing
a story based on a photograph.
Rocking the Unit! (approximately 3 weeks):
Reading: In a shared text, class will do a series of lessons on using
pictures to predict what is happening in the text, using pictures as a source
of information, asking and answering questions about the information and the
point of view, determining importance/main ideas/important details,
differentiating between fact and opinion, and identifying authorial bias and
purpose.
Teacher will continue to read non-fiction texts to support the strategies
being taught in mini-lessons. Students will share at least two texts in order
to differentiate between non-fiction informational texts and non-fiction
journalistic pieces built around a bias/opinion. A bias text on natural
disasters might include information about pollution or global warming or
something controversial that implicates human involvement in a seemingly
natural/unavoidable occurrence.
The class should be encouraged to bring in articles from magazines/newspapers
about the weather or natural disasters in order to create a collection of
Feature Articles that can be used for research, for read alouds or as mentor
texts.
Fiction Option: Teacher can read aloud The Cay by Theodore Taylor to bring a
fiction dimension to the classroom that will engage the students in
discussions on nature, human nature, racism, isolation, etc. These themes can
be tied in to the unit by highlighting the vulnerability of people and the
fragility of our lives. This can also be a method of differentiation for more
accelerated students who may want to perform text-to-text connections between
non-fiction and fiction pieces.
Writing: Working on a Shared Writing Piece, the class will learn different
strategies for writing and researching information for a Feature Article. The
students will then take what they learn from the Shared Piece and apply the
strategies and lessons to their own work on the natural disaster of their
choice. During Read Aloud and Reader’s Workshop, the class will come up with
a list of characteristics that make up a Feature Article. These
characteristics will then direct the creation of the Rubric for the final
product. The class will create the Rubric together in order to encourage
investment and success on the part of the students.
Mini lessons will include: choosing a natural disaster and making a list of
10-15 questions that they would like to answer over the course of the month,
narrowing down the focus of the questions to come up with one unifying
message split up into 5 subheadings/chapters, finding information from our
touchstone texts, collecting information on index cards and saving the
information in envelopes marked by the questions they answer (these envelopes
become the material for each subheading within the piece), structuring
paragraphs and sequencing information, writing effective and purposeful
introductions, stating one’s opinion/position, writing effective conclusions,
using details and concrete facts to back up one’s opinion/position, cutting
out repeated information, writing in complete sentences, using comma lists
and other conjunctions to combine fragmented thoughts into complete
sentences, subject-verb agreement, and using a revision/edit checklist before
publishing.
Each of these mini-lessons can be split up over the course of the writing
process from pre-writing to publishing.
This unit is designed to take 3.5 to 4 weeks.
Extra applications: Math: Weather graphs and charts. Social Studies:
Discussing regional/geographical differences across the United States.