Welcome to HIT—How I Teach….In this episode, I explain my methods for teaching paragraph breaks and give a lot of my “paragraph theory” and “pre-writing theory.” Paragraph breaks is often a difficult concept for students. And teaching paragraph breaks is also difficult.
Thankfully, I have found a solution to the paragraph break problem—and I have used it as I have taught hundreds of students to write using this amazing solution.
Here are some of the highlights of this episode:
- Don’t count words (or letters!) of a writing project: count paragraphs!
- Writing is made up of paragraphs
- Paragraphs are made up of sentences
- Sentences are made up of words
- Words are made up of letters
- Start with paragraphs!
- Paragraphs are units of thoughts. Every time we change thoughts, we change paragraphs.
- Pre-writing—deciding what each paragraph will be about is the “secret of the universe”😉
- Starting out with three of something is the beginning of teaching paragraph breaks: three animals, three pizza toppings, three castle objects you would like to be friends with (HIT #47), three of anything….easily dividable!
- Then move to three ASPECTS of something: three reasons why elephants are endearing animals (HIT #48); three ways fairy tales help kids (HIT #43); three ways to survive in a jungle (HIT #34)
- Use outlining lines to help students with paragraph breaks, links, topic sentences, etc.
- Use a train to teach the Paragraphs of Body (PoB), opening paragraph, and closing paragraph
- Much more! 😉
It’s all here in this week’s HIT—where each week, I bring you tips, tricks, and techniques for teaching writing, language arts, grammar, and more (to grades two through twelve) drawing upon my 100+ curriculum books totaling over 50,000 pages.
Note: This lesson came from The Write Right Quick Kit, an upper level, teacher, parent downloadable book!
Find everything you need here!
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Master (continually updated) Teacher’s Notebook downloadable booklet:https://languageartsladyblog.com/teachersnotebook
Free writing books and videos of me teaching your students for you for a couple of weeks! https://languageartsladyblog.com/5writingfreebies
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How I Teach YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC20OP_HNTUm8eBMNgMh06sQ
How I Teach Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-teach/id1552986393
