Opening and Closing Paragraph Instruction for Research Reports

Which came first–the chicken or the egg? Or which comes first–the body or the opening paragraph? I have some strong opinions about this that I answer in today’s blog video/live class! 🙂 Additionally, this post contains a video lesson on creating opening and closing paragraphs for research reports. I teach my students (and I use this approach in my books) that there are over a dozen ways to create an opening paragraph. (See idea list below.) I also teach them that in upper level writing, they should be very specific in their opening and closing paragraphs. No more summarizing here and there (or restating everything you say in the paper!). I teach them HOW to write the various opening and closing types so that they can use them in their writing. Watch today’s video and follow along with a few pages of the text we used. (Jump Start II–coming out this month!)

Here are some of the opening/closing paragraph types that I teach and include in my publications.

(Many of them have templates that students use for outlining–sort of fill-in-the-blank outlines that are easy for students to fill in and write from!)

1) Statistics

2) Story

3) Dialogue

4) Quote

5) Verse

6) Newspaper report

7) Informative

8) Summary

9) Song

10) Rhyme/Poetry

Download the portion of the lesson containing this teaching and watch the video to learn more! (P.S. There’s a Prepositional Phrase Sentence Opener lesson near the of the video too!) And check out MC sample lessons (at the end of this blog post) for more opening and closing paragraph information!