Teaching writing in second grade is amazing! Students have already grown so much through kindergarten and first grade, then continue to develop their writing skills at lightning speed! This is a great time to dive into informational writing! If you’re not quite sure where to start, keep reading to find several tips for teaching 2nd grade informational writing.
The first step of informational writing is the topic. You might be wondering if it’s better to give students a writing prompt or a general topic for their informational writing. I suggest that you don’t use either!
During writers workshop, I never give students a topic. Instead, an informational writing unit is a great opportunity for students to explore ideas that interest them.
Research tells us that the best way to get students engaged in their own writing is by allowing them to select the topic they have the most energy to write on. Encourage your students to be responsible for what they will write about.
But I know that even second graders need help to get their ideas flowing! On the first day of your informational writing unit, you can have each student generate a list of things they know a lot about. Let me tell you…they will be experts on ALL sorts of things.
You could even give a mini-lesson where you talk about how writers get ideas. Students will brainstorm a list of topics they can write about. (You can practice brainstorming with other forms of writing, since self-selection of a topic is so important!)
Your students can add to their lists as you continue to explore informational writing as a class.
A great way to introduce students to informational writing is with nonfiction mentor texts.
The National Geographic Kids readers have always been one of my go-to choices for mentor texts. They have lots of fun facts about interesting animals, but they are also filled with great examples of text features. These grade-level texts are the perfect informative writing mentor texts.
You can keep your chosen mentor texts available for students to access throughout the unit. It’s so helpful for them to reference these ideas as they format their own writing.
Once students have had a chance to choose a topic and they have an idea of what informational writing looks like, it’s time for them to plan their writing.
Oftentimes, when students begin to write informational texts, they have a hard time going beyond the first topic sentence. This is where graphic organizers can come to the rescue!
Through mini-lessons, you can introduce a graphic organizer to help your students compile the facts that they want to share about the topic. This step can help students know if they have enough factual information to support their writing. They might need to do a little bit of research!
It’s important for your students to have a power topic to write about, whether this information comes from background knowledge, research, or a combination of both.
Expository writing is unique because it includes so many text features! Having a few anchor charts to support your young writers is important. Students will have learned about most of these text features through mentor texts, but additional visuals are always helpful.
Anchor charts are easy for students to reference as they work to include text features in their own informational writing. They also help students review important vocabulary words such as comparisons, captions, maps, and cutaways.
As you launch your informational writing unit, be sure to ask students to select a writing goal. I’ve always liked to create an anchor chart and have students place their names next to the area where they want to focus their writing attention.
As you move through the writing unit, students may wish to adjust their goals. You could even ask students to move on to a new writing focus if they have mastered their previous goal.
The reason I chose the goals above is that they correspond to my rubric for assessing the students’ writing. We don’t want any surprises! At the end of the writing unit, all of the students are assessed with a final writing piece and the rubric is used again. This is a great way to see writing growth!
During writers workshop, it’s very important to confer daily with students about their writing. If students are not in a conference with you, they are writing independently and should stay actively engaged throughout the entire writing time.
If you’d like to get a better picture of how this can work in your classroom, check out my blog post about how I confer with students during writing time. There is some kindergarten writing in this post!
One more thing! With all of the writing and research going on in your classroom, it can be difficult for students to keep themselves organized. Check out my blog post where I share the perfect way to help students keep all of their writing materials in one spot!
Let’s take a look at this nonfiction book written by a second grade student in Colorado!
One of the second grade standards is to know and use text features. What better way to understand this skill than to use it in our own writing?
This student even included captions! “A fox chasing a bird”.
You can see this young writer latched onto the comparison anchor chart and included it in this writing example.
Sweet little illustrations, too!
This second grade teacher added a couple of extra pages for a diagram and glossary. What a great idea!
All of the printables, mini-lessons, anchor charts, and rubrics mentioned in this post are included in one easy-to-download resource! This writing curriculum includes everything you need to put together an effective writers workshop for informational writing.
Just click below to take a closer look at everything included in this easy-to-use resource.
My teaching career allowed me to experience teaching in different classroom environments and grades. My heart belongs to early childhood education. My job is to make teaching FUN, ENGAGING, and EASIER. Welcome!
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