How+to+write+a+letter

=Lesson for the Week: Writing a Friendly Letter Expressing a Point of View= >
 * **Resource:**@http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/letter_generator/
 * **Standards: CCLS: 3.W.1 -** Write opinion pieces on topics or texts, supporting a point of view with reasons. **3.W.6 -** Production and Distribution of Writing - With guidance and support from adults, use technology to produce and publish writing (using keyboarding skills) as well as to interact and collaborate with others.
 * **Objective:** Write a friendly letter to the principal of a school from the point of view of an irate parent.
 * **Assessment:**
 * Students will have composed a friendly letter to a principal of a school where some view technology as extremely important to learning. They will have written a paragraph explaining why they are against at least one claim made by Mitchel Resnick in his article, "Technologies for lifelong kindergarten". Example:
 * **Technological Knowledge Needed**
 * linking from wikispace
 * how the software works
 * how to save, open, print and share a Friendly Letter Generator file
 * knowledge that a .rwt file is a file type used specifically for the Read - Write - Think Interactives
 * **Pedagogical Content Knowledge - ideas**
 * one computer per student will enable each student to write their own letter at their own pace
 * the read-write-think software scaffolds the learning of how to write a friendly letter
 * there are many components of a friendly letter and the computer can highlight the critical features of each (heading, salutation, body, closing and signature)
 * this would be a two-day lesson in the 3 - 5 grade range because kids' keyboarding skills are very weak
 * some students may not know their address, you must have a plan for this
 * students will need reminders to capitalize and use punctuation
 * If this were done with third graders and we were writing an opinion piece, we would need to brainstorm (pre-write) first
 * **Reflection**
 * Goes here
 * **Rubric - [[image:http://www.wikispaces.com/i/mime/32/application/vnd.ms-excel.png width="32" height="32" link="/file/view/rubricV2.xls"]] rubricV2.xls**