Teaching Your Child to Write Paragraphs

Paragraphs are the building blocks of essays and papers so it's important that kids learn how to write unified, coherent and well developed paragraphs.

Here are some resources to help you teach kids how to write great paragraphs.

Lessons/Tutorials

• Teach Your Child How to Write a Good Paragraph - HomeschoolWithLove Blog
• Growing with Grammar - this is a sampler that has a 5 day lesson on paragraphs.
• How to Write a Paragraph - for older students; a 23 page PDF 
• Time4Writing Paragraph Writing - this is just a unit outline of their writing class but I think it's a great outline to use for writing lessons.
• Paragraphs - Writing Center UNC - Great for older students.This handout will help you understand how paragraphs are formed, how to develop stronger paragraphs, and how to completely and clearly express your ideas.">

Graphic Organizers

Hamburger Organizers
A popular method to teach younger students how to write paragraphs is to have them write down their ideas in a hamburger shape. The top bun is the topic sentence; the burger, lettuce and tomatoes are the details, and the bottom bun is the concluding sentence.

• Reading Rockets Hamburger Graphic Organizer page - this page includes tips on using the graphic organizer and has two graphic organizers you can download.
• Timandevail.com's Hamburger Paragraph Graphic Organizer - this is a black and white version of one of the ones that are linked above at Reading Rockets. This is nice for slightly older elementary students  as the topic sentence, details, and concluding sentence is not in the actual hamburger but lines are provided off to the side; as older students may be using more detail or complex sentences, I think this gives better space.

Use Graphing Questions as Writing Prompts? Yep!

In the younger grades, kids are often given little questions to survey their class, tally their results and graph.  One day it hit me that these were great questions to have a beginning writer sit down and answer.

Typical elementary graphing questions include questions like:

• What color is your hair?
• What color are your eyes?
• What is your favorite season?

Assigning questions like these can make for great for handwriting practice or to help with beginning grammar/sentence concepts.  You can write out the question on paper or a white board and have students respond to the question (teaching them how to rephrase it in the form of a statement). Make sure to also stress that complete sentences are written.

For younger kids, you could give one sentence daily, or you could give them several.  You might have them actually survey family members each day, graph the result and then write sentences like, "My mother has brown eyes" or "Three people in my family have brown eyes."

At any rate, if you just need something quick to get a younger one writing, these can be very helpful, in shaa Allah.

I found an extensive list of graphing questions at CanTeach:

End "What Shall I Write About?" - Use a Writing Prompt Generator

If we want kids to do well in writing, they have to, well.... write!  And lots. Giving daily writing practice is one way to help achieve that, in shaa Allah.  Some kids like to write and need little or no help thinking about something to write. But, maybe more often than not, some kids need a little help. You can provide writing prompts (make up your own or find oodles of them on the internet). But sometimes your writing prompts will get met with an eye roll or sigh (heck sometimes they make me sigh too just thinking about them).  So, you might try a writing prompt generator such as one I found online.

With this generator, kids can click to generate their own prompts in three ways (as seen in the picture below):

• Get a generated phrase of an adjective, noun, and verb
• Get the names of three random objects to craft a story about
• Get a plot generated with a protagonist, antagonist, setting, goal, important event and/or object. Students can use all the things generated under here or just use one or more.

My daughter chose the three object one one time and crafted a cute little story. 

So, if you need some help getting a student started writing, this writing prompt generator is a little trick that might help.

Visit the Writing Prompt Generator