How I Teach The Organization of Essays!


Use graphic organizers to teach your Middle School ELA students to learn how to organize an essay!  #outline #template

I have been teaching middle school ELA for quite some time now and I have to tell you, teaching writing is my favorite thing to teach!

Previously, I shared how I introduce the essay writing vocabulary with a blend of traditional two column notes and interactive notebooks called Pixanotes.  

This time, I will share how I teach the organization of essays.

Over the years, I have found that my students can generally write complete sentences and paragraphs but have trouble figuring out how to use text to inform their work and organize it into an essay. And even though I may show them model after model, the concept of organization still seems to evade them.

My solution?  Patterns with outlines/frames.

In my research on patterns, the ASCD said "When students seek patterns in the world around them, they see order instead of chaos, which builds confidence in their understanding of how the world works and gives them a feeling of control."

This makes perfect sense to me.  As teachers, we use patterns to create lesson plans as we use the same template over and over. Sure, we add things to the template as the needs arise, but the same basic structure remains.  This same principle can be directly applied to students learning to write essays.

I am all about making ELA time-savers to reach all learners.  These outlines work to do just that.  The idea is that on the left, the concept of what needs to be written is presented in words with a picture to help the student create a memory cue.   The right is where the student writes his/her own sentence according to the concept presented on the left.

Give your middle school students a writing frame to help them learn how to organize their essays.



Now I know some will say that this creates very basic writing and that is true because this is just a foundation.  Think about it like this:  How could one decorate the walls of a new house if the walls haven't been built yet?  They can't!  The organization of essays are those walls.  Once those walls are up, then word choice, voice and more can paint them and add other embellishments like mirrors or artwork.


You can get these outlines to use with your own classes too!  They're available in my Writers' Toolkits along with all kinds of other sentence starters for transitions, evidence, commentary and more.  You can even get a free sample of the Informative outline which is in my resource library.


  

Click on either image to see more!


Thanks for stopping by!