Moving younger students from sentence combining to paragraphing to short essay writing is easy when you apply an incremental, scaffolded approach.
In the early grades, students should consistently compose writing that:
expresses a thesis or claim.
backs that claim up with some sort of evidence.
makes sense of this evidence and ties it back to the claim.
Based on most states’ academic standards, students should begin supporting basic claims in their writing as early as second grade. They should progress into writing simple and then more sophisticated paragraphs in grades three and four, and by grades four and five, they should expand this paragraphing and venture into basic essay writing.
At essaypop, we take students through these learning stages in a strategic and incremental manner that builds on their previous progress.
Younger students (grades two and three) begin using the essaypop platform to compose simple quickwrites. Quickwrites allow younger students to jump into the writing quickly and without restrictions.
Once a comfort level has been established composing single-frame quick writes, students move into simple paragraph structures where they state a thesis or claim in one writing frame, provide some sort of evidence or detail to support the claim in the next frame, then move on to explain or analyze the evidence and tie it back to the claim in the last frame.
Once students master the basic concepts of claim, evidence, and explanation, then they can begin adding elements that will allow them to start crafting more sophisticated paragraphs, power paragraphs, and even short essay responses.
Our Lesson Library is a Game-changer
In addition to a beautifully scaffolded writing area that younger students will comprehend immediately, teachers are going to love our comprehensive lesson library that takes advantage of our step-by-step system. We're actually kind of famous for our lessons.
Our writing lessons cover multiple domains from response-to-literature, to expository writing, to argument, to narrative storytelling. Each lesson comes with useful resources and a detailed lesson plan.
The essaypop Hive is the collaborative and interactive heart of the system. It is a place where teachers and students can discuss their work and leave substantive commentary and feedback for one another. It is a safe and social environment where students engage with one another and learn from their peers. The Hive enhances students' joy of learning.
Learn more about the Hive