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!