RAINBOW Categories in Explanatory Writing

Do your students have trouble using evidence to support their writing?  This is a common problem and it makes it difficult for students to produce strong, focused writing.  

Last summer, I went to a professional development session where Cathy Whitehead, Tennessee's 2015-2016 teacher of the year, led a PD session on rainbow synthesis.  I instantly knew it was the perfect foundation to develop a pre-writing strategy that would be easy to use for students. RAINBOW Categories is my favorite pre-writing strategy and I know once you try it, you and your students will love it too!

Teaching students to categorize evidence into topics is invaluable.   It gives them the confidence and independence to write, without constant supervision and reassurance from the teacher. It is especially perfect for students who are visual learners.  

In my classroom, I use mentor essays, or interactive writing (see previous post), to show the thinking a writer goes through during each step of the process.  During this time, we create a class essay and use RAINBOW Categories. 

The steps for rainbow strategy are easy to follow:

1. Pull apart the prompt and create a question to focus on as you read.
2. As you read, write down words or phrases that will answer the prompt.  This is the evidence you will use when you write. This also helps students with paraphrasing when writing.
3. Once you've finished gathering evidence, categorize evidence by color.  During the model, we try to look for similarities in topics to identify categories. We look for the things that make sense together and circle them.  We create a key to identify topics by color.  These topics will be part of our thesis statement, later becoming the topic sentences for our body paragraphs.
4. Conversations about words that could go in multiple categories will undoubtedly occur, as well as whether some words belong in any of our chosen categories.  Show students the thinking that should take place when categorizing and making those important decisions. 
   
5. After we use RAINBOW categories, we evaluate our evidence to ensure it is adequate.  If we need more, we return to the text.  
6. We create our thesis statement using the categories we developed. For example, in the graphic above, the thesis statement is: The Titanic was remarkable because it was an enormous cruise ship, was luxurious, and had safety features that set it apart from other cruise ships of its time.  What makes this beautiful is the evidence is already organized by paragraph.  This makes writing so much easier for students.
7. Eventually, to prepare for standardized testing, we change the colors to shapes: circles, squares, and triangles.  Students won't always have access to three color markers.
8. After the pre-writing strategies, you are ready to begin writing.

RAINBOW Categories is also great for opinion writing.  It just has to be organized differently.  During that type of writing, instead of organizing our writing as seen above, we use a t-chart.  The heading of each side of the t-chart are the two choices.  As we read, we put evidence on the appropriate side.  For instance, if the prompt asks who made a bigger sacrifice: Ruby Bridges or Karl Heinz-Shnibbe, we label each side with those two names.  As we read, we put evidence about each person on the appropriate side.  When we've completed completed reading our text and filling out our t-chart, we categorize the evidence on the side that reflects our opinion, develop our thesis statement, and begin writing.  So much easier than any other prewriting strategy I've seen.

Providing students with a strategy to organize evidence before they write will improve students writing.  Teachers need to become experts at providing students with a variety of strategies to do this.  RAINBOW Categories is one way your students can become superstars when they organize their writing!

Making Writer's Workshop Possible: Class Mentor Essay

If you had told me ten years ago I would love teaching writing, I would have told you you were crazier than a teacher getting an evaluation on party day.  But I do!  Why, you might ask? Because I've finally figured it out.  I've discovered how to create writers. This year, I've created students who believe they are writers and I owe it all to Writer's Workshop.

Mentor Essays in Writer's Workshop

It's an exciting time to be a writing teacher.  The shift in the new standards emphasize students' ability to write.  As teachers, we need to think carefully about how we teach writing because we play a central role our students' success. We must effectively teach writing and we should embrace that challenge with excitement. 

To make writing manageable, it needs to be broken down into bite-sized chunks, so students can master one element at a time. One of those chunks involves using a mentor essay.  

A mentor text is a term we are familiar with.  It is a text that is an example of good writing for writers. A mentor essay is a text students write with the teacher to provide guided practice of how to write a good essay. 

Steps For Success With Mentor Essays

I start each year with opinion writing.  Let's be honest, our students usually love their own opinions, so I say let's use that to our benefit!  I start by telling them opinion writing is their chance to prove they are right and that appeals to them. Then, I explicitly teach how to write an opinion essay through a series of mini-lessons, while simultaneously writing a class mentor essay. The steps for writing a mentor essay are easy to follow and implement in your classroom.

1. Define It: I start the writing unit by explaining to students we will create a class essay together.  I tell them it will be our "mentor essay".  This essay will be a good example of how to write.  It will have an introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion paragraphs that they will want to replicate.  It will be their go-to if they ever get stuck in their own writing.  It will be displayed for them to use throughout the year. 
2. Read Texts: If we are going to write a mentor essay together, we have to read the texts we are going to write about.  Prior to reading the texts, we look at the prompt, as I would expect them to do with their own essays. Then, we read the texts. I have varying level of students. Some students can read the text independently and some read it in small groups with a teacher.  It is important to give your students the support they need to access the texts so they can write about it, without taking away their opportunity to be independent.
3. Write: As I teach each component of opinion writing, we write the mentor essay as a class on anchor chart paper.  When I say we, I mean we. This means let go of your control and use their ideas.  If their ideas need improvement, then help guide them to making their ideas work. Students will value the mentor essay more if they contributed to its writing. During this time, I often pretend I am them, and think out loud. Teach them strategies during this time that a good writer uses.  The teacher must model what a good writer does so students know what good writers do. For instance, when writing an introduction, we write it, evaluate it for effect, check it for the elements of an introduction, and then reread it for clarity.  Many times, I leave mistakes so we can correct them during the edit and revise stage.  Modeling is critical during this step and will lead to better student writing.   

   

   The class uses our rough draft to revise our final draft.
   
   

4. Edit and Revise: It takes us about a week to write our class model, maybe more, because we write each part as I teach it. Once we've written it, we edit for mistakes. We revise parts that are weak or need more evidence.  This is a step many students skip in their own writing, so it's important to teach them how critical this step is.  We mark up our original essay.  I draw arrows, cross out, and change words as they see fit.  I model what I want them to do.  I tell them revising can be messy and that's okay!
5. Rewrite: Once we've edited and revised our rough draft, we rewrite our essay.  I have the students write their own copy of the mentor essay so they have a copy to keep in their Writing Notebooks.  
6. Replicate: Replicating isn't the final step. It actually happens during the other steps.  It is something the students do during their WW. They replicate what we do in writing our mentor essay in their own writing.  

If you have any questions about using a mentor essay in your class, let me know.  Mentor texts are an invaluable part of any Writer's Workshop.  It is important that students see what good writing looks like, so they can apply that knowledge to their own writing.