How to Improve Students’ Paragraph Writing With Just One Paragraph a Week

Are you struggling to teach paragraph writing?Are your students grappling with the concept of organizing their ideas into paragraphs? 

Paragraph writing can be a difficult concept for students to grasp, especially for young writers. 

Paragraph writing is something that needs to be practiced continuously over time. It is not a skill that can or should be simply taught in one grade level, and then applied. 

Every paragraph for every topic is different. Meaning there are opportunities for students to learn in every paragraph they write.

That is why I like to teach students how to write a paragraph… one paragraph at a time. Meaning, students write one paragraph a week. Check out my resource by clicking here.

What is Paragraph Writing?

Students learn that a paragraph is a string of sentences that share a common theme or idea. 

I therefore present students with one topic per week. They need to draft, develop and edit this one paragraph over the span of a week, with each day of the week providing students with a specific task they must complete. 

Yup! That’s it! One paragraph per week. This makes it super straightforward for students, as opposed to essays that have students try to string tons of ideas together at once. 

Types of Writing Styles

There are 4 common types of writing styles: 

• Expository Writing
• Persuasive Writing, 
• Narrative Writing
• Descriptive Writing

I like to have my students practice one writing style for 8 weeks before moving on to the next one. 

Students became immersed in each writing style as they are writing. 

I also teach these writing styles in my instruction, on top of this weekly paragraph writing activity.To do this, I I teach them: 

• vocabulary to use for that particular writing style
• Grammar that is commonly used for that type of writing
• With modeled examples, such as picture books, modeled paragraphs, etc…

Not only is this helpful for students, but it means I have 32 weeks of writing activities already planned! Check out the resource here!

Steps for Paragraph Writing

There are specific steps that students need to follow when drafting a paragraph. Oftentimes, when students have an entire essay to write, these steps get lost in the shuffle. One of the benefits of having students write one paragraph a week, is that they get to spend some serious time improving on each step of the writing process.

The following are the steps students would follow each day of the week when following the one-paragraph writing method. 

On Monday, students receive their new topic, and brainstorm their ideas. I created the activity on Google Slides, which allows students to work directly on the digital slides. I will share the slides on students’ Trello boards. Read more about how I use Trello Boards in my classroom by clicking here!

Tuesday has students organize their ideas.

Then on  Wednesday, students write a topic sentence and a closing sentence.

On Thursday, students put all of it together to edit and revise. 

Finally, on Friday, students can present their final draft of their paragraph to their peers. 

Topic for Writing

Do you know why students often struggle with writing? Because they aren’t interested in the writing about the topic they are given.

It is hard to find words for something you either don’t know about or don’t care about. 

That’s why it is so important to find topics that are educational and relate to the curriculum, yet are relevant to students; this is especially true when you are getting students to practice a writing skill. They need a topic which provides ample ideas to write about. 

That is why I chose topics that are relevant to students. I chose topics that shouldn’t cause too much of a struggle when brainstorming ideas. See the full list of topics by clicking here!

Paragraph Writing Rubric

Each week, I evaluate students on their paragraph of the week using an evaluation rubric.This rubric is very simple and easy to use.  Evaluate students on their ability to:

• Write in complete sentences
• Identify the topic 
• Include topic sentence and closing sentence
• Use varied sentences
• Show that they have revised/edited their work

PS- Don’t forget to download your FREE workbook “The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Teaching Tasks”. I share tons of tips for saving you time, so you can focus on being an engaging, fun and creative teacher. You can get it by clicking here!