Writing Persuasive Text, The Lorax continued...

First up today I read students Krista Bell's book Lofty's Mission as a way of introducing the ways in which animals were use or abused in warfare. The book is fiction, but in Australia between 1942 and 1943, during the Second World War, home breeders like Charlie Morris donated more than 13, 000 baby pigeons "squeakers" to the army to be trained as messenger pigeons. Several Australian birds won the Dickin medal for bravery. We also looked at some non-fiction accounts and examples of the ways in which animals were employed during the major wars Australia has been involved in. Students will be writing a persuasive text either in favour or against the use of animals in warfare tomorrow. Today they were also provided with a structure to assist them.  This ties in with all the work we have done on emotive texts and use of rhetorical questions over the last three weeks.

Structure:
Introduction
– include a statement to give the author’s opinion
– preview important arguments
– engage the reader’s attention
Body
– include a series of paragraphs
– give a new idea or argument with reasons and examples to support it in each paragraph
– use persuasive language
– use quoted or reported speech
– use cohesive language to link ideas between paragraphs
Conclusion
– restate the position of the writer
– sum up the main arguments
– include request action to be taken by the reader (optional)
– do NOT give any new information


We then view a short film clip from Behind the News on sniffer dogs used to detect bombs.   We revisited the idea of using keywords to take notes.

http://www.abc.net.au/btn/story/s2214523.htm

After lunch we read some factual accounts of animals being used  in warfare in terms of transport haulage, communications, morale boosters, and as live weapons. We also spent a fair bit of time looking at how to do a good search on a topic and to question sources without adequate citation or from trustworthy websites. Tonight students have been requested to do some further reading on animals in warfare and to explore their arguments ready to write their persuasive text in a 50 minute time frame first up tomorrow morning..

The Lorax was also back on the agenda and a generous amount of time and guidance given to look at the similarities and differences between the original version of The Lorax and the Hollywood adaption. Students will be expected to continue working on this tomorrow night as part of their literacy homework. 

We watched the trailer again to refresh their memories and looked at IMDb the Internet Movie Database.

Maths will be a major focus tomorrow.