3 parts To identifying important vs interesting details & facts in writing

Now that we are in February, we are almost to the end of our American Contributors unit.  We have been researching George Washington and Abraham Lincoln this week.  

Today, let’s chat about how to tell the difference between important vs interesting details in our writing.

We will talk about how I tied our social studies unit into our reading and writing mini-lessons…because let’s face it: We don’t have a lot of time.  The struggle is still real… So, when I find a way to tie reading, writing, and science or social studies together into one big block of time, I’m a happy teacher!

During our first two weeks of our American Contributors unit, we worked on identifying facts from a text that support each person’s contribution to American history. We also focused on how to choose what to write about.  

Then, our reading focus became listening to decide if information is a fact or an opinion.  

This week I had two reading goals in mind to wrap up our unit.  First, we would find the most important facts about a main idea or a person. Then, we would compare important vs interesting details in a text.

At the beginning of this unit, we were stopping after every page or few pages to tell the facts we learned about the person we were studying. This week, we “graduated” to listening to the whole article or book and then recalling facts from the entire text. Yay!  I think this helped kids filter out the minor details and focus on what’s important!

identifying important vs interesting details

The first day, we started by reading one of my very favorite books…The Important Book, by Margaret Wise Brown. This is a great text for learning about main idea and key details in reading.

We read each page and talked about what was important about each topic and what was interesting.  We also discussed WHY the important fact was chosen as important.  We read the book across two days during our reading time to keep the lesson part “mini!” 🙂  

We charted our discussion on our facts can be important and interesting anchor chart.

writing important vs interesting facts

While The Important Book is a great book for picking out the main idea and key details during reading time, it also doubles as an excellent mentor text for using important and interesting details in our writing.

During writing, they chose a topic and wrote about what is important and interesting in the same pattern as the author of our mentor text, Margaret Wise Brown.  We just did this in their journals, but they were too cute not to share!

Nakid… haha! I never get tired of reading first graders’ writing!

So how does this tie in with content?  Because after these activities, we were able to move on to charting important and interesting facts on Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.  Here’s the beginning of our chart for Lincoln…

No, the dry erase board chart isn’t the cutest, but it got the job done.  And this was the perfect segway into our writing time where we talked about which kind of facts we need to include when teaching about someone.  

This chart important vs interesting details anchor chart helped make it easy for kids to see that while the interesting facts help give our writing style, it’s our duty as authors who teach our readers to include several important facts as well.  And this made a HUGE difference in their informative writing!

Now that we’ve got our important vs interesting details down pat, we will be moving on to how to choose facts to support our OPINIONS!