Lesson Plan

• Read the first page of the chapter together. The children may enjoy sharing other information and stories about spiders. Next, ask them to think of new topics of interest. List these on the board.
• Choose one of the topics and model a cluster with the help of your class. Tell students that listing what you know about a topic is the first step to writing a report about it. Also mention that there are many places to find more information—people, books, magazines, the Internet, and so on. Demonstrate this by obtaining another fact about your topic from a book or magazine and including it in your cluster.

Classroom Applications

Large Group

• Review the second page of the chapter with the children. Then model writing a short report about the topic you’ve already clustered. Show the students how each fact can be turned into a sentence. Elicit your class’s help and suggestions along the way.
• Option 1: Assign “Plan Your Report.” Tell the students to choose a favorite topic and begin to fill out their clusters. Once they have the information they need, ask students to write their reports using “Write Your Report.”
• Option 2: Choose a specific topic and work through the entire report-writing process as a group. Use “Plan Your Report” and “Write Your Report.” As you guide the planning and writing stages on the board or chart paper, students can fill in their papers. Follow this timetable:

1. Day one—plan
2. Day two—write
3. Day three—revise/check
4. Day four—publish

Pairs

• Pairs of students interested in the same topic may work on a report together. Whether they work individually or in pairs from the start, children should pair up for the revising and checking stages. Ask them to read their sentences aloud, listen for anything that doesn’t sound right, and then change whatever needs fixing.

Individual

• Plan to conference with students at all major steps of the project. If possible, get help for these one-on-one meetings. After reviewing their clusters, direct students to other sources of information as necessary. Also help with sentence construction.
• When students are ready to prepare a final copy, they may do this themselves or dictate their work to someone else. Give them time to add pictures to their reports if they wish to do so.