How to Teach the Five-Paragraph Essay

The five-paragraph essay is a pretty standard form taught at the middle and lower high school levels. While some teachers feel that this structure fetters student creativity, most feel that the structure is a necessary one for students to master. Rote adherence to this structure, of course, is not an end in and of itself. Nevertheless, command over it will help students progress forward and will probably serve them well when responding to open-answered test questions on standardized reading and writing exams.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Start small. Before you can even think about teaching a 5-paragraph essay, you need to ensure that your students feel comfortable writing a solid paragraph. Introduce the concept of main idea and supporting details early in the year, and get your students writing paragraphs with topic sentences frequently. For example, make them write answers to homework questions in full paragraphs.

2. Warm students up to the concept of the thesis statement. Most teachers introduce the thesis statement in conjunction with some literary essay assignment. If this is too difficult for your students, teach them that a thesis statement is simply an argument, and let them develop thesis statements about a more simple topic.

3. Model. When you are ready to have students approach the five-paragraph essay, write one yourself (on whatever topic you will be assigning), or write one as a class. Obviously, you must follow the exact structure you will expect of your students.

4. Provide a template. Ultimately, students will need to be able to produce an essay organically; however, it may be useful to provide a template or an outline for students to fill in when they write their first five-paragraph essay. Students can then practice revising their essay in order to add in more interesting language/detail.

5. Give weight to the conclusion. For some reason, teachers tend to gloss over the conclusion paragraph, simply telling students to restate their arguments. The last sentence is also a bit confusing to students, who often don’t know how to wrap it up. Give some extra attention to the teaching of this section, so students can feel successful all the way through the essay.

6. Be willing to modify. For some students, writing three solid paragraphs will be a challenge. Others may need you to provide a few theses from which to choose. Differentiate appropriately so that each student has an assignment he or she can be successful completing.