• Jul. 29, 2008
Learning to Write a Paragraph
Right now Taylor is learning about paragraphs- what they are and how to write them. We spent the first week copying short paragraphs and learning about indenting. We talked about how we don’t start each sentence on a new line, but keep going until we run out of room. We are still working on our small/tall letters, spaces between words, punctuation, and capitalization. I feel like she should have all of this by now and get frustrated when I see that she doesn’t. It’s not been easy for me to accept that this is just an area that she struggles with, but I’m working on it. Yesterday we covered the concept of a main idea. I used little post it sized colorful papers to write words on - such as dog, cat, fish, bird, snake, hamster and she had to figure out what the main idea was. In this case it was pets. We did this about 12 times. Then we looked through some books from the library and I chose paragraphs for her to read and tell me the main idea. At the end I let her choose one of the paragraphs to copy. Today we will be learning about the topic sentence. I wrote 3 paragraphs out on posterboard and underlined the topic sentence. Then I cut the topic sentence out. Through the course of the lesson she will match the topic sentence to the appropriate paragraph.. She will do a cut and paste topic sentence worksheet and copy another paragraph underlining the topic sentence. I knew that Taylor needed to learn this, but I had no idea how to teach it to her. So I moseyed myself to the computer and did a search for how to teach paragraphs. The best link I found was to here.
I plan on following out the rest of the lesson, but maybe a little faster than taking 6 weeks! I love the redlight idea and already made her writing office using that concept.
