Teach Writing Reviews for More Engagement: Writing Tip Wednesday

Looking to add more student engagement during writing time? During the holidays is the perfect time to take a break and teach writing reviews to your class. They’ll love getting to rate and write about their favorite things!

Why teach writing reviews?

Writing a review fits under the opinion writing genre. For students, it’s a chance to pick a topic that excites them. Most students are already familiar with the idea of reviews with all the YouTube videos they watch. Why not add it to your writing curriculum and boost their writing confidence at the same time?

When we teach writing reviews we are showcasing the opinion writing foundation of stating an opinion and providing reasons for that opinion. Believe me, it will be easy for your students to come up with reasons why they love or hate what they are reviewing.

More reasons I love writing reviews:

Creates student buy-in for the lessons
Many opportunities to showcase different reviews
Moves beyond typical opinion writing
Reviews are student-friendly

What types of reviews should I teach?

I would say teach the types of reviews you feel comfortable teaching. If your students are a little older, find a couple of great YouTube videos with kid reviewers. Model your lessons on the format the YouTuber uses in their video. Ask your students to duplicate the format with their own review on the same item or a different item of their choice.

Book reviews are very common and often a little harder for students to write. In my opinion writing unit, I teach students how to write a book review and I use other student written book reviews as models. Find a unique take on book reviews that will make it exciting for your students. Maybe it is a fun way to publish the review or recording a fake YouTube video of their reviews for the class to watch.

Try brainstorming a list of things to review with your class and have them vote on their favorites. Use this list to form your lessons. I love having my students feel like they have a voice in the classroom and what better way than asking them what they want to do!

A few ideas for different types of reviews are:

Favorite school supply
A read aloud from class
A snack or recipe they (or their family) tried
A candy salad the class makes
Their favorite subject or special
Favorite toy (either one they own or want)
The school cafeteria food
Favorite meal or restaurant

What should a review include?

Regardless of what type of review you choose to focus on, you’ll want to include some basic elements when you teach writing reviews.

Stated Opinion

All reviews should state an opinion about the thing being reviewed. Before diving right into telling their opinion, students should first engage the reader. Teach students how to write a good hook to draw the reader’s attention. For younger students, you’ll want to provide just a few examples of hooks and have them choose the one they look best to try to use as their own.

Fun Rating Scale

Although not absolutely necessary, I love to include some type of rating scale when I teach reviews. Here is a great chance for your class to get creative. Again, you can ask your class to vote on what you’ll use for the rating scale. Fish? Stars? Smiley faces? The sky's the limit for choosing the item.

I would recommend the class using the same item so the rating scale is consistent. If you want students to choose their own item, have them keep the amount the same as well as what each rating on the scale means.

Reasons for their Opinion

All reviews should include several reasons for the stated opinion. I like to teach each new reason as its own paragraph. This way students provide more details about their reason rather than just saying “I liked it” or “It was horrible.”

The point of opinion writing is to express details on why we feel a certain way. By asking students to write a new reason in its own paragraph, you are setting them up for future writing success in upper grades. For first or second graders, this can be challenging but if you are explicit in your teaching they will be able to do it.

Closing Sentence

The last thing I would say is a requirement in any review writing, it is to have a closing sentence or wrap-up. Students will want to restate their opinion to wrap up their review. I like to provide a few sentence stems for students to choose from to start their closing sentence.

Some of my favorites are:

In closing,
This is why,
In summary,
To sum it up,

I hope you’ll give review writing a try. It’s such a fun way to teach opinion writing. If you want an easy, done-for-you option check out my Second Grade Opinion Writing Unit found in my TpT store.