Tried it Thursday: "PEELS" Response

Linking up with the wonderful Holly from Fourth Grade Flipper for a Tried it Tuesday, Thursday style! A little late to the party, but with a great resource to share! With PARCC testing approaching in March, I've been looking for an easy way for my students to organize writing for their Performance Based Assessment. A co-worker suggested the super easy PEEL(S) model!

First, we glued this handout in our Reader's Notebooks. 
You can grab your own copy from Tracee Orman's TPT store - for FREE!

Then I modeled and went through the process with Maniac Magee. Our prompt was to choose one theme from Maniac Magee and support the theme with evidence from the text.

Here's my model: {Want a copy? Click the image to grab the PDF}

Then students got to work and started writing their own PEEL paragraph answering the same question about their book club novel.

Look at all this writing about reading! And evidence, evidence, evidence!

So, happy I tried this organization method. My goal is to do a quick flash drafts of short essays using PEEL each week until we take the PARCC. Students can choose to create the organizer before writing or they can go straight to the paragraph but I will be checking and monitoring all the PEELS parts during Reader's Workshop "Writing Days."

What have your tried to help students write about reading?