5th Grade · Grammar · W.5.9, W.5.8, W.5.2.A
Informative Writing Lesson Plan for 5th Grade
A ready-to-teach informative writing lesson for 5th Grade, built around planning introductions, conclusions and five-paragraph essays, organizing fact card essays, supporting answers with text evidence, and taking, sorting and citing research notes. Print the plan, print the practice pages, and you are set.
Approximately 45 minutes
Learning objective
- State a theme or a claim about a text and support it with quotes
- Explain how setting, point of view and traits shape characters
- Write a response or a letter that uses a detail from the text
Materials
- Text evidence
- Citations
- Writing strong introductions
- Informative essays
- Comparing and contrasting
- Research essay writing
- Pencils, and whiteboard space for the modeled examples
Lesson steps
1. Notice it first (5 min)
Put two sentences on the board, one that uses informative writing correctly and one that does not. Ask students which sounds right before you name any rule. Noticing comes before naming.
2. Name the rule (I do) (8 min)
Now name informative writing and state the rule in one sentence. Write it where it can stay all week. Model correcting the broken sentence from the warm-up.
3. Fix them together (we do) (12 min)
Work through four or five sentences as a class. Mix in one that is already correct, because students who are pattern-matching rather than thinking will "fix" it anyway and reveal themselves.
4. Independent practice (you do) (15 min)
Hand out "Text evidence". Students work independently. Circulate and watch for the students who can do the exercise but cannot explain the rule, since that gap shows up later in their writing.
5. Apply it to real writing (5 min)
Students find one place in their own writing folder where informative writing applies, and fix it. This is the step that moves the rule from worksheet to writing.
Check for understanding
Read the last two sentences of each student's independent work. Applying informative writing correctly in their own sentence matters more than getting the exercise items right.
Differentiation
Extra support. Students who stall: pull them into a small group and rebuild informative writing with concrete materials or a simpler text before asking for the written work again. Do not send the page home as homework, it will just rehearse the misunderstanding.
Extension. Students who finish early: ask them to write their own informative writing problem for a partner to solve, then check the partner's work. Creating a problem is harder than solving one and it surfaces whether they really understand informative writing.
Skills covered in this lesson
Text evidence · Citations · Writing strong introductions · Writing conclusions · Five-paragraph essays · Informative essays · Comparing and contrasting · Research essay writing · Biographical writing · Informative writing prompts
