Teaching The 5 Paragraph Persuasive Essay

Students then form into groups and work on labeling a third example essay.Lesson Plan: You Do Students re-form into rows, complete a brief exit slip asking pertinent questions about the 5P essay.

Lesson Plan: We Do Together Students read through a second five-paragraph essay on their own and label it as best they can (with elbow buddies in certain classrooms).

Teacher takes volunteers to come up with a thorough and complete labeling of the essay.

Persuasive writing asks the writer to provide arguments for and against something in order to convince the reader of a point of view.

Use these introductory phrases, structures, and phrases to connect your sentences and create a logical flow.

In my opinion, the net positive gains outweigh the negative consequences of such a move towards more free time for all.

Objective: SWBAT identify the parts of a five-paragraph essay.

At first I was skeptical in the extreme about using the terms bing, bang, and bongo to represent the parts of the essay's outline. Also, the way that I've structured the guided practice, a lot of the kids end up right just by labeling parts of the essay based on where they appear--they don't read them or get the feel of the essay's meaning much. The objective here is just to be able to label someone else's five-paragraph essay, but the learning's meaningless unless it's tied to the students' subsequent writing of such an essay themselves.

But it's actually a very useful technique, if only so you can avoid saying "the main idea of the first body paragraph" over and over again. I didn't find much of an effective way to get through the objective in a robust way that was shorter. I did this in a cross-curricular project, having students write about evolution as they were learning about it in their science classes.

The most difficult step is to choose the topic and type of essay at the very beginning. The most common of them are Narrative, Expository, Argumentative, Persuasive, Cause and Effect, etc.

Properly chosen topic and paper type is half of the job done.