Best Movie Ever: Fact vs Opinion Lesson

My goal for these lessons is to drive home the point about facts versus opinions, but to keep the topics interesting, relevant, and short.  It is very important to me to devise short assignments that will help build essential skills for larger essay assignments.  Instead of assigning perhaps ten essays over a year, I'd like to design many, many short assignments which can be shared in class or returned to students within a couple of days providing meaningful feed back to both student and teacher.  Then the longer assignments can be less frequent and used as to show mastery versus practice.
 
The Basic Lesson:
Students write a paragraph or two about their favorite movies.  Depending on the situation, you can provide an example, possibly even modeling how you write it in front of the students.  Make sure your example uses facts to support opinions. 

Once done, use highlighters to color facts and opinions in different colors.  If possible, model the highlighting on your example paragraph.  Students could do this independently or in partners.  Students could highlight their own paragraphs or a partners.

Share some of the facts and opinions highlighted.  Discuss why each are fact or opinion.  

To take this lesson further: 
Each of these can be used with the specific assignment described above or adapted to work alone.  

• Repeat the assignment with a different topic.  Ideas include: favorite song or band, favorite book, favorite sports team, why your best friend is awesome, why your pet is awesome. 
• Discuss using facts to back up opinions.  Using your example, show how the color for fact follows the color for opinion.  Have students examine their writing for this pattern.  Revise by reorganizing or adding to support opinions with facts.  
• Some students have trouble with the opposite.  Their writing contains all facts and fails to make an assertion.  I used to see this often when a student would just retell the plot of a story for a whole essay and never state or defend a thesis.  These students should look at the colors in their highlighted paragraph and revise to add opinions. 
• Research the topic quickly and print the article. (You could use this to as an opportunity to work on some other researching skills if you like).  Highlight the research using the same colors for fact and opinion.  Again, modeling with an article about your own topic can be helpful.  Discuss the patterns seen in the article.  Does the author back up opinions with facts?  If one color is seriously missing, talk about the validity and reliability of the source. 
• Work on adding research to a piece of writing. Do you need to add facts from the article?  How does adding someone else's opinions help the writing?  Once material is added to the paragraph, insert citations.  When applicable, discuss how opinions must always be cited, but facts might not if they are considered general knowledge.  (This would be a great bridge into that lesson if not already covered).