Welcome to HIT—How I Teach….In this episode, I teach a five-paragraph essay—a super-duper fun writing project for students in fourth through eighth grades (with tweaks for going lower or higher in grades for this assignment!). The reason I say it is super-duper fun is because my students light up when they get to write these fun five paragraph types of projects. They are fun essays that lean into research just enough to get students gathering info to make their essays sing!
(Before you get too far in this description, you’re definitely going to want to get this week’s Teacher’s Notebook with the lesson there for you to download and print for your students!:)
Here is what you will learn in this broadcast:
- Using an Overview Box to give “expectation explanations” before each project (always, always!)
- Using a sample for soooo many reasons: getting students excited about the project, getting their creative juices flowing, teaching all of the elements that they will need to include,* and more!
- How to help students see what information they need for a writing project and what they already have “in their brains”!
- Using the cues of the outlining spaces (provided for you in your Teacher’s Notebook!) to remind them of what all they need to include in their paper:
- Link/topic sentence for each paragraph
- Support sentences for the paragraph of the body
- Topic of each paragraph
- How to put topics and info into the paragraphs in the order that you introduce them
- Writing various types of opening paragraphs, such as definition, quote, story, statistic, informative, and rhyme paragraphs
- Where and how to include the Thesis Statement in the opening paragraph
- Where and how to include the Thesis Statement reloaded in the closing paragraph
- How to use a story to book-end the essay split in two for the opening paragraph and closing paragraph
- Much more! 😊
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 essay!
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 Write On, Beauty and Beast, Level III, a month-long downloadable book available at my Teachers Pay Teachers store and my LAL store!
Find everything you need here!
Weekly broadcast episodes with Teacher’s Notebook downloads (and links to listen or watch!) at the Language Arts Lady blog
Master (continually updated) Teacher’s Notebook downloadable booklet
Free writing books and videos of me teaching your students for you for a couple of weeks!
All of my digital books
How I Teach YouTube Channel
How I Teach Podcast
