4th Grade Language Arts
Opinion Writing
Unit 2
Unit 2: Opinion Writing
What is Opinion Writing?
Opinion writing is using your thoughts and feelings in order to convince your reader to change how they feel about what your writing is about. Writers often aim to get the reader to understand their point of view with their opinion by implementing facts and evidence. Your opinion must be supported from facts from the text.
What is the Importance in Opinion Writing?
Opinion Writing allows you to express your point of view. If you feel strongly about a certain topic and want to express your feelings towards it to persuade the reader to side with your opinion as well, you'd use the skills in opinion writing.
Fact vs. Opinion
When learning about opinion writing, it's important to first review the difference between facts and opinions.
Fact
A statement that you can prove with evidence.
Example: Adelina is sixteen years old.
Opinion
A statement that says what someone thinks or feels.
Example: Adelina is the best soccer player in the world!
When writing an opinion writing you can use these starters and phrases!
Choosing an Opinion to Write About
Finding something to write about may be hard, unless you're given a prompt to write. Check this video and these organizers out to find out good ways to organize your thoughts and find topics to write about!
Introduction
An introduction is important in narrative, informative, and opinion writing! Remember, introductions must catch the reader's attention and also should introduce what topic you are writing about. You can make your hook a question, fact, or statement, then state what one opinion is, and state what the other opinion is. This is so the reader can have some context about what the two sides being argued are. Finally, tell what your opinion is. Watch this video to learn more about writing the introduction for your draft!
Body Paragraphs
Remember, in your topic sentence of your body paragraphs, you must give a clear sentence explaining what the ENTIRE paragraph will be about. When using transition words, use sentence starters that go before your facts and elaboration. After you use your facts and evidence, you can also elaborate by explaining how you feel about the topic, tell what the evidence shows, tell what you think about the topic.
Conclusion
Your conclusion should have a statement about your topic (from your introduction) and about three sentences that sum up your key ideas from your three body paragraphs. This is because in your conclusion, you want to wrap up all the points you've introduced to argue for your opinion and leave the reader thinking about whether or not you persuaded them.
Revising and Editing
These two videos will explain the process behind revising and editing your opinion writing, which is a key step no writers should skip! This is because many skilled writers will re-write and edit their drafts over and over many times until they are content with it. Every author makes mistakes in their first few drafts and often changes entire paragraphs while editing, so don't be afraid if you don't like a certain sentence and want to switch it up!
Think You Got It? Here's a Prompt!
Choose one prompt out of this chart and try to write your best opinion writing based on the videos you have seen so far in this unit. Make sure to include an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. You can either write this in a notebook or on your device in a document, and we will share and discuss later. Remember, these prompts will be discussed so it's important that you try your very best, and revise and edit until you feel confident about it. If you're having any trouble, use the blog to ask any questions!
Progressive Verbs
A verb indicates the time of an action, event or condition by changing its form.
Progressive verbs will end with -ing and can fall under the past, present, and future progressive form.
Here's a quick example of what the progressive tense might look like compared to other verb tenses:
Let's Start with the Present Progressive Tense
The present progressive form often implies a process.
David is rushing to school because he woke up late. (is rushing is in present progressive form)
Azula and Zuko are fighting because they had a disagreement. (are fighting is in present progressive form)
Think you have it down? Try this quick quiz/exercise and see how you do! https://web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/courses/elc/studyzone/330/grammar/pcont1.htm
OR
If you're still having trouble, check this link out! http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/tenses/present_progressive.htm
Let's Move On to the Past Progressive Tense
The difference between the plain past tense and the past progressive tense is pretty much the same as in the present tense. The single-word form often shows what happened in the past. The progressive form may pinpoint action or a state of being at a specific time or occurring in the past on a regular basis.
Elijah was shopping yesterday to find clothes for his little sister's birthday. (was shopping is in past progressive form)
Mona is tired because she was running all day. (was running is in past progressive form)
Think you have it down? Try this quick quiz/exercise and see how you do! https://web2.uvcs.uvic.ca/courses/elc/studyzone/330/grammar/pascon1.htm
OR
If you're still having trouble, check this link out! http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/tenses/past_progressive.htm
Finally, Let's Explore the Future Progressive Tense
You won’t find much difference between future tense and future progressive except that progressive gives you slightly more of a sense of being in the middle of things.
Karl will be playing Hamlet and needs to practice a lot.
Karl's actions in the sentence above may be a little more immediate than:
Karl will play Hamlet and needs to practice a lot.
In the first example, will be playing is in the progressive form of the future tense. In the second example, will play is in future tense.
Think you have it down? Try this quick quiz/exercise and see how you do! https://www.englishexercises.org/makeagame/viewgame.asp?id=4434
OR
If you're still having trouble, check this link out! http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/tenses/simple_future.htm
Helping Verbs
Helping verbs such as will, shall, may, might, can, could, must, ought to, should, would, used to, need are used in conjunction with main verbs to express shades of time and mood. The combination of helping verbs with main verbs creates what are called verb phrases or verb strings.
Check This Video Out!
Here's a useful song for learning helping verbs! These can be pretty tricky, so make sure to keep practicing these every day to get better at identifying them and using them.
Feel confident about it? Try this quiz and see how much you know! https://www.softschools.com/quizzes/grammar/helping_verbs/quiz520.html
Linking Verbs
Since you know helping verbs and progressive verbs now... let's try to tackle linking verbs! Many students tend to struggle with identifying different types of verbs so if you ever feel overwhelmed, feel free to come back to this page as a review! Now let's get started.
A linking verb will link the subject of a sentence to a noun or adjective and connects the sentence without an action verb.
Order of Adjectives
Adjectives are words that describe or modify another person or thing in the sentence. But did you know the articles — a, an, and the — are adjectives? In this topic, we discuss the order that we place our adjectives. This becomes a very important part of writing because we use it a lot more than you think!
Here's a quick game to try out once you've watch the video below! https://www.ixl.com/ela/grade-4/order-adjectives
These resources do a really nice job of helping you understand what order of adjectives are and how to do it properly!
Feel confident about this already? Try this quiz and see for yourself! https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/adjectives-order-quiz.htm
OR
If you feel like you need some more help, try this link out! It does a great job expanding on this topic. https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/english-grammar-reference/adjective-order
Interjections
Interjections are words that show a lot of feeling! They are included in a sentence - usually at the start - to express a sentiment such as surprise, disgust, joy, excitement or enthusiasm.
Can you name any interjections? Some terms we use a lot could be Ouch! to express pain or Ugh! to express frustration.