How I Teach…Paragraph Writing from Paragraph House Outline (Episode #7)

Welcome to HIT—How I Teach….In this episode #7, I’m excited to bring you some tips for young writers, specifically descriptive paragraph writing for elementary students. I use one of my month-long downloadable books to teach a simple outlining approach called The Paragraph House Outline. Of course, any writing project needs to have all of the elements that a student needs to learn in order to complete that project, so I will walk you through the outline, writing, opening sentence, closing sentence, adverb addition, CAVES (five parts of a sentence), and simplified Checklist Challenge—all using a darling project of describing a character from the Beast’s castle.

(You will get blank Paragraph House Outlines—so you can use the Teacher’s Notebook over and over again to teach any descriptive writing project for second through fifth grade students!)

By filling in the rooms of a house that are labeled for young students (See, Feel, Hear, Smell), students do not have to wonder what to put in their paragraphs. A few notes in each “room of the house,” and they are ready to write descriptively!

Of course, just like every lesson in my one-month downloadable books and my one-semester Meaningful Composition books, this one also has the invaluable sample paragraph (and sample Paragraph House Outline!).

I also introduce an effective acronym for teaching grammar concepts: TPA—Teach, Practice, Apply. I show how to use a sample essay or passage of text to TEACH the skill (i.e. find the adverbs, discuss them, etc.). Then how to use interesting sentences to find adverbs (or any parts of speech)—PRACTICE. And how the APPLY portion of that acronym should literally be applying the skill to the student’s writing (in my books, in the form of the Checklist Challenge, which you can get for FREE here!).

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.

But wait…there’s more! Not only do I teach parents, teachers, and homeschoolers the hundreds of teaching tools I have developed over the past twenty years, listeners/viewers also get a weekly downloadable booklet, Teacher’s Notebook (TN) that has actual lesson sheets that you can print off and use with your students to teach the very topic that I just taught you!

And for your convenience, How I Teach…. is available as a podcast (follow along in your TN sheets for that week) and a YouTube video (with Power Point containing the same as the TN)!

Note: This lesson came from Write On, Beauty and Beast, Level I, a month-long downloadable book!