So it’s that time of year and you’re tasked with teaching your elementary students to write opinion pieces. I always thought this was a hard unit to teach to my third graders because there aren’t very many mentor texts to teach from. Additionally, many students don’t have the critical thinking skills needed to write and support their own opinions! They need lots of practice!
In this blog post, I’m going to walk you through ways you can introduce opinion writing to your students (no matter the grade level) and how you can help them learn to have opinions!
Step 1: How to First Introduce Opinion Writing
It sounds simple and straightforward, but the easiest way to begin an opinion writing unit is to teach your students to have opinions!
Believe it or not, it can be hard for 3rd, 4th, and even 5th grade students to recognize their own opinions about a subject. And if they don’t have opinions, they can’t write to defend them.
There are several fun ways to teach your students to have opinions. Try incorporating opinions into another subject area such as your math or reading lessons!
Incorporate Math
Graphing is a perfect skill to integrate with your writing standards. In this case, you can ask younger students their favorite book (or animal, sport, etc…) and graph the class results. Students can collect data and can write simple opinion statements.
Incorporate Reading
When you are teaching the author’s point of view, you can incorporate opinion writing!
It’s as simple as teaching your students to agree or disagree with the author’s opinion!
Learn more about teaching point of view here.
Would You Rather?
This is a fun game you can play and it’s a great way to get your whole class moving. Begin by having your class line up in a central location. Have two designated places for students to move for choice A and B.
Then, pose questions. Based on their preference, they’ll move to side A or side B.
Try to use familiar topics. Make sure your students know there are no right or wrong answers and it’s okay if they don’t have a strong opinion about the topic.
Would You Rather Questions:
- Would you rather stub your toe or get a paper cut?
- Travel on a sailboat or travel on an airplane?
- Have extra recess or extra technology time?
- Have pizza for lunch or nachos?
- Play a board game with your family or watch a movie with your family?
Stumped on question ideas? Have your students each write one! Then, you can simply read them.
Step 2: Opinion Statement Sort
After students have spent time learning what it means to have an opinion, you can move on to teaching them to write opinion statements.
Practicing identifying opinion statements can help students understand what a strong introduction for their opinion piece will need to have. You can show your students examples of weak introductions such as “I like sharks” or “green is cool”. Discuss the difference between these sentences and an introduction with an opinion statement. You can make an entire mini lesson focusing on these writing skills.
Once students have learned to write an opinion statement, they are ready to move on to writing an opinion paragraph.
Step 3: The O-R-E-O Paragraph: Easy Organizational Structure for Young Writers
You’ve probably heard of O-R-E-O writing before, but if you haven’t, it’s a fun way to teach students how to write opinion paragraphs.
Students begin by writing their opinion statement (O), then give a reason (R), an example (E), and restate their opinion sentence (O).
Opinion writing prompts are the perfect way to get your students some good practice writing these paragraphs. Check out a huge list of opinion writing prompts down below!
Make sure to give your students plenty of work time to practice refining their writing skills. For struggling writers, you can create sentence frames for each sentence of the paragraph.
The OREO paragraph is a very basic organizational structure that you can use when introducing opinion writing. From there, once your students are ready to advance in the writing process, you’ll want to teach how to write a formal opinion essay!
Ready to have your students write their opinion pieces? Check out my ⭐Opinion Writing Units⭐ (Grades 2-5)! These come in both print and Google Slides formats! They include lesson plans, mentor texts, graphic organizers, anchor charts, rubrics, & more!
Students need lots of practice writing opinion paragraphs! Check out these opinion writing prompts!
Teach Your Students to Write a Strong Introduction!
