How to Teach a Compare & Contrast Writing Lesson

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Laura from youngwritersworkshops.com and I'm going to talk about how to write a compare and contrast writing lesson. If you think about it, a compare and contrast lesson is really writing about two different things, so begin the lesson by choosing those two things that you're going to compare and contrast and then lead your students in creating a visual map, or a clustering map, of each of those two things. So work on description for each of the items that you'll be comparing or contrasting separately. Lead them through the exercise of brainstorming what it is that they would use to describe these two things. Next, explain to them how you're going to look at the two things and figure out how they're similar. In this way, the visual representations that you've done can be really helpful, because you can find, you can even realize that some of the way, some of the descriptions might be the same for the two things. Next, the next step is to do the same exercise about how they're different. List ways that the two things are different or find ways, by looking at your map, that they have something that's very different about them. Walk the students through a compare and contrast exercise, paragraph writing exercise. Now, depending on the age of the students, this could be one paragraph where you say these two items are the same in this way, these two items are different in this way, and a conclusion. It could be a several paragraph essay where you discuss it in much deeper detail, how they're the same and how they're different and what the conclusion is that you take from it. But in any case, it's helpful to do a mini lesson where you explain, or walk through the process of writing this compare and contrast. And now you'll be ready to assign the students to work on this kind of essay, or paragraph, on their own. Those are some steps to teaching a compare and contrast writing lesson."