What is important, though, is organizing the material, and that is where students have trouble. They do not want to take the time to organize their thoughts, ideas, or material before they write.
Personally, I benefit from even a casual outline. That way, I don’t have to start with the introduction and work my way down to the conclusion; I have the pleasure of beginning wherever I like, where I feel the most comfortable. Then I can fill in the rest of my article later by using the organized points in my informal outline.
Whether your students use sticky notes or a more formal outline, they’ll benefit from these familiar outline ideas.
Instead of practicing an outline with difficult material, your students will use something they are familiar with. Grocery stores are organized in an orderly way; this will make outlining one easy-peasy.
On the free worksheet, your students will fill in a sample outline based on how a grocery store is organized. The worksheet already has the levels of a formal outline such as I, A, 1, a, and so forth.
Your students may want to extend the outline to include more grocery store departments. If so, they’ll use their own paper.
If they are not ready for a formal outline, let them use the sticky-note method .
Like the grocery store outline, your students will fill in a sample outline based on kinds of restaurants. The restaurants can be in your area, ones you’ve visited while traveling, or ones nationwide.
The worksheet already has the levels of a formal outline such as I, A, 1, a, and so forth. Your students may want to extend the outline to include more types of restaurants. If so, they’ll use their own paper.
If they are not ready for a formal outline, let them use the sticky-note method .
Intro to Writing, Part 3 takes some of the pain out of outlines by using material your students are already very familiar with: restaurant categories and the way grocery stores are organized. Grab it and the free printables here. >>
Part 4 features a tutorial on writing effective paragraphs. In it you’ll find a chart, an example paragraph written from the chart, and an empty chart your students can use again and again for their own paragraph constructions. Find this dandy tutorial for middle school students here. And the tutorial for teens, with an endangered Porcupine Park, can be found here.
Part 5 is a tutorial on point orders, with a link to a video explaining point orders. You can get it here. >>
Young Ender Wiggin, in Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, is smallish for his age, smart, and a bit of a misfit. In the movie of the same name by Summit Entertainment, Colonel Graff wants Ender to remain a misfit and even manipulates events so the other young students will hate Ender. Graff doesn’t want Ender to rely on anyone and even cuts off his emails to and from home so the young boy can focus on his studies.
Despite the people in his life that try to keep Ender from forming relationships, he creates his own network of friends and allies as he moves through the classes and battle games. He realizes, as does the psychiatrist Major Anderson,
SHARON’S BLOGLet’s use a quote from Confucius and a passage from Proverbs to get your students thinking about wisdom. In this bundle of writing prompts centered around wisdom, your students will encounter these types of writing: opinion, personification, parallel construction, definition, and more. These prompts are just right for students in grades 5 – 12. So,…
HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fought for racial equality in the 1950s and early 1960s before he was assassinated, but he did not advocate violence as a means of reaching this goal. Read the following excerpt taken from Stride Toward Freedom, written by him in 1958:
Ever wonder why some writing is so confusing? Most likely they’ve choked their verbs and turned them into nouns. Make your writing clear with vivid verbs.
HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS From Sunny to Frigid Buck is a dog who grew up in sunny San Diego, California, but suddenly finds himself thrust into the frigid world of the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon Territory, Canada, in the late 1890s. You can read about him in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild….
Former US presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson corresponded almost daily, and they were waiting for something important to happen. They wanted to live to see the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. What are you waiting for in your life?
