4th Grade Facts & Opinions About Famous People
Fourth graders at Holladay Elementary have been studying famous Americans from the pre-Civil War time period (VS.7), and their benchmark tests revealed that many of them needed help distinguishing between facts and opinions (SOL4.6h). This is a very important skill, since most propaganda and persuasive articles are a mixture of both facts and opinions. So today we created websites about the famous Americans that included facts and opinions, and our classmates had to decide how we were trying to persuade people to feel about the person. First I asked them to choose a famous American from the pre-Civil War era (John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Abraham Lincoln, or Nat Turner). Next we signed into CheckThis with our Google accounts. I showed them how to change the theme, colors, and fonts of the webpage. They researched their famous person online to gather some facts. Then they wrote a paragraph about him or her and added some opinions of their own. Next they added a photo of the person. Finally, each student wrote a poll question at the bottom of their site, asking their classmates to identify how they were trying to persuade their readers to feel about the famous American. You can take a look at some of their websites here.