Fun with Outlines. No, Really.

Could your students use a little help creating outlines? And what does a bowl of salad have to do with outlines?

My husband tells me he always made his outlines after he’d seen what he had written. I imagine this is fairly common.

But is an outline necessary? Not exactly. You can read about my sticky-note method here.

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.

7 Prompts on Wisdom

SHARON’S BLOG
Let’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, what did Confucius have to say about wisdom? And do your students agree with him?

For the Love of Narnia and Middle Earth

SHARON’S BLOG
Narnia and Middle Earth—what delightfully intriguing places to visit!

Enjoy this compilation of activities involving C. S. Lewis’s Narnia and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

Suitable for anyone who is old enough to read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, other Narnia tales, The Hobbit, or The Lord of the Rings.

Your students haven’t read those books? No problem. Many of the prompts and tutorials below are freestanding and don’t need the original books.

Ready? Put on your magic rings!

What Is Your Theory of Happiness?

SHARON’S BLOG

Would any of your sentences ever sell for $1.56 million? That’s what happened recently with Albert Einstein’s one-sentence “Theory of Happiness.”

The story, according to USA TODAY, is that Einstein was visiting Japan to receive his Nobel Prize in physics in 1922 when he did not have enough money to tip a messenger. What did he do?

He wrote down one sentence and signed it, saying that it would be worth a lot of money someday. Looks like he was right!

Intro to Writing, Part 7: Introductions and Conclusions

SHARON’S BLOG

Get a writing assignment. Look at a blank piece of paper for hours. Cry.

Is this what happens with your students?

No need for weeping. In this week’s Intro to Writing, your students will learn what ingredients to put into their introductions and conclusions. In addition, they will grade other students’ work and then write their own effective introduction and conclusion.

If you have been following along with the Intro to Writing tutorials on Writing with Sharon Watson, you likely have noticed something weird.

Intro to Writing, Part 6: Easily Develop Thesis Statements

SHARON’S BLOG

Thesis Statements

A guy walks in to your living room and blurts out, “Pizza.”

You look at him and wonder what he means. Well, you know the subject matter—pizza—but you don’t know where he’s going with this. He could take it in any of these directions:

“I want pizza.”
“Pizza is bad for you and here’s why.”
“Eat more pizza; it contains all the food groups.”
“I know how to get bigger tips working as a pizza delivery person.”
“This is how to build the perfect pizza.”
“The pizza you buy here is very different from the pizza you can get in Italy.”
“With six hundred dollars borrowed from their mother, two brothers began one humble Pizza Hut, now an international chain.”

Or, of course, he could mean, “Here’s the pizza you ordered. Now give me a tip so I can get out of here.”

When you write an essay, writing about the subject matter is only the beginning. Readers need to know what direction you are taking your subject. That way, they will keep reading and will understand what you are doing. For instance, if your introduction looks like you are going to write about the founder of Amazon but you end up writing about all the cool stuff you can find there, your readers will be confused.

What’s your main idea? What’s the one thought you want to convey to your readers? Everything you write about your subject matter is going to be gathered around one statement, one main idea, so that people reading your essay know what direction you are taking your subject.

This main idea is called a thesis statement.

Intro to Writing, Part 5: Point Orders

SHARON’S BLOG

Problems with Point Orders?

One of my students handed in an interesting essay on volcanic activity. She included lots of facts, dates, and anecdotes, but there was one big problem.

There was no rhyme or reason for the order in which she put her facts. Each major or historic volcanic eruption was in its own paragraph, but the paragraphs were in no particular order. It felt jumbled and incoherent.

How could she have arranged her paragraphs to have the most impact on her reader? Check below for two possible answers to this conundrum.

Intro to Writing, Part 4: Paragraphs

SHARON’S BLOG

Can a chart rescue poorly written paragraphs?

Do your students have trouble coming up with ideas to put in their paragraphs? Are their paragraphs only one or two sentences long?

Are they a jumbled mess of ideas?

A paragraph is all about one idea. In it, your student will teach something about that idea, explain it, or prove why it is the right one.

In Intro to Writing, Part 4, you’ll find a practical chart to help your student formulate ideas and put them into a credible paragraph.

Intro to Writing, Part 3: Outlines

SHARON’S BLOG

Outlines.

Did I lose you already?

The idea of outlines and actually creating them can be confusing and frustrating to our students.

But what if we could make organizing material a little easier for them?

Intro to Writing, Part 3 takes some of the pain out of learning about outline. It uses material your students are already very familiar with: restaurant categories and the way grocery stores are organized.

6 Literature-Based Writing Prompts

SHARON’S BLOG
Literature holds an Aladdin’s cave of treasures that students can plunge their pens into.

Whether it’s imitating good writing, pondering a topic in the story, or using the story to write another, your students will gain a healthy curiosity for great works of literature as they write.

To enjoy these fun prompts, knowledge of the following stories is not necessary.

Terms covered: epiphany, spatial description, and paraphrase.

These literature-based prompts are suitable for your 5th – 12th graders.

Ready to go treasure hunting?