![\"Dividing](\"https:\/\/farm1.staticflickr.com\/352\/31197452293_c6792469aa_z.jpg\" "\\"Dividing")
<\/a><\/p>\nI also remember the teacher giving my paper back to me and telling me to divide it into paragraphs. What I don\u2019t remember is any lessons on paragraphs. I think those would have come in handy! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
When new students come to my writing classes, the first \u201cwriting\u201d problem they encounter is that of paragraph breaks. And I would expect no less. Paragraph breaking is difficult. We tell them that when they change topics, they should change paragraphs\u2014but the entire paper is about the same topic! We tell them that each paragraph should be a unit of thought\u2014but the whole paper feels like a unit of thought to them!<\/p>\n
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Poor kids!<\/p>\n
I love kids too much to leave them stuck in that continuous cycle of \u201cI don\u2019t know how to break my paper up into paragraphs!\u201d<\/p>\n
And the way I have gotten around that in my classes and all seventy of my books is to teach students to commit ahead of time as to what each paragraph will contain. Then they label each outlining space with each paragraph\u2019s topic. Easy peasy. This approach works. (Check out two week samples of Meaningful Composition here to see how I use this outlining technique in all of my lessons.)<\/p>\n
I have been enjoying Facebook Live and have gotten a lot of good feedback on my teaching videos. Thank-you for your encouragement!<\/p>\n
So to demonstrate how to teach Paragraph Division, I created a video of me teaching this concept to some amazing fourth through sixth grade students. We had a lot of fun\u2014and it clearly demonstrates how committing to each paragraph\u2019s topic ahead of time really works!<\/p>\n