Blog 3: A Lesson That (kind of) Worked

For about a month, I decided to work on standard 5-paragraph Essay structure.

I came up with my own Outlined format for the students to follow. But it ended up being rather close to the "Mr. Brown's Format" or something like that that the 7th-grade English teacher was teaching. I teach social studies, by the way.

So, I decided instead of giving a test for the chapter, to work on an essay with my students. It took longer than I expected. I suppose what I did was more of a unit than a lesson.

Basically I started with a topic (How does the physical environment affect or change human culture?) and then went through the steps of planning out an essay. Prewriting techniques such as brainstorming, knowledge web drawing, and outlining.

My goal was for the students to pick up the techniques and be able to organize their essay in the format I was looking for.

We started out just by brainstorming about the topic. Then I tried to get them to group their brainstormed ideas into main ideas (which I explained would be their paragraphs).

Then we wrote the introduction together (Thesis and three main ideas). We then wrote one paragraph of the body at a time together (three main ideas - three paragraphs). For each of these, we also brainstormed examples to support the main idea. Finally we wrote the conclusion together - in which we just reworded the Introduction.

Part of the problem is that it would often take a long time to get through just one paragraph. Or it might have been to tedious to do more than one paragraph in a period. My AU adviser suggested that I mix things up by just doing one step in a class and then doing two other 20 minute activities. She has suggested this to me more than once, and I'm trying to adjust my lesson planning to have 3 20-30 minute activities to better keep the attention of my 12-13 year old 7th graders.

When it came time to write their own essays a handful could actually write a good essay that was the reverse question (How does human culture change the physical environment)? We did things the same way: one step at a time.

I decided to have them write on any topic they chose and a good number were actually able to do it in the format I was looking for. I was very happy about this.

All in all, if I were to do it again, I would try to plan out the steps more thoroughly and and also mix it up more on a day to day basis. My adviser suggested teaching grammar rules in parts that I thought they could use help with. I also would probably start off with a topic I thought the whole class could complete with relative ease (including the brainstorming steps)

It was a very interesting experiment in teaching writing. And I was happy that it went alright.