Writing paragraphs

In writer's workshop recently, we have been working on writing paragraphs. A paragraph is a collection of sentences which all relate to one topic. This is one of the last steps to our research writing unit. Next, we will be pairing our paragraph with some other informational text features to make it easy for our readers to learn about the topics we are writing about.

We started our research process with lots of note-taking. Mr. MacLellan read a page from a book, and then students had a very short time to write a note about what they read. We talked about how notes don't have to be your best handwriting. Mr. MacLellan showed some of his own notes and nobody could read them!

Next, students organized their notes into categories. We color-coded the notes, cut them out, and glued them with similar other notes.

Finally, we started writing our paragraphs. Students picked one topic relating to our research on bees. They wrote a title on the top of their page, and started their paragraph with an interesting question to get the reader interested in reading more. We will be finishing these paragraphs later this week.

For our current homework project, students need to take their notes about the family holiday, celebration, or tradition, and write a paragraph from their notes. They should use the same structure we used in class: