Using Facts to Support Opinions in 1st grade

I’ve spent the last 2 blogs focusing on deciding whether information is fact or opinion and focusing on the difference between important and interesting facts.  All with the goal in mind of working smarter, not harder to combine reading, writing, and that all-important, but hard-to-find-time for science and social studies units!

Now we are ready to move from identifying and differentiating between facts and opinions to using facts to support our opinions.

Our last focus for our American Contributors Common Core unit was…

…using facts to support opinions.

This has been a problem for lots of my firsties over the years.  You know, when kids write,

“Abraham Lincoln was a great president.  He was shot and killed….”

Really??? I just shake my head.  Every. Time.

We’ve talked about it here and there over the years, but this year I decided to give it a little more focus!

Sorting Facts That Support Opinions

So we worked in partners to sort facts about Lincoln to decide if the facts support the opinion or not!

Using Facts to Support Opinions in Writing

This helped SOOOO much when we finally wrote our own opinions about which president was our favorite!  I’m so glad we used this activity to help us.

You can find these 2 sorts for using facts to support opinions and lots more president activities in my Presidents’ Day packet.