Students and teachers across the planet have pets within their classrooms. Some teachers say the pets are for educational purposes, while others suggest that these pets help build responsibility in their students. A whole other group of teachers and students believe that classroom pets are simply a pain, and create nothing more than a distraction in the classroom. Now have your students decide if classroom pets should be allowed in classrooms.

Students are given two articles with opposing views of classroom pets; one for and one against. (The articles are around a 1,000 lexile.)

Students are also given a note page, a graphic organizer to get them through the planning stage of planning, as well as stationary to write their essay.

This activity allows students to read articles, while practicing using text details to support their claim, a common core standard of writing.

Please note, I have this project listed as taking a week. This would be the approximate length if you used this as a complete project using the stages of writing.

Thanks for looking,
-Dan M.

Clip art provided by Monster Wrangler Mike, and Lovin Lit, Pigknit, and Our Monitos.