Paragraph of the Week: Improve Student Writing

When teaching math, we teach our students new skills, give them practice opportunities in class, and send them home with even more practice for homework. This makes me wonder….”Why don’t we do the same for writing?” This idea motivated me to start incorporating Weekly Paragraph Writing Homework into my classroom. This same system can also be used for Morning Work, Centers, Interactive Notebooks, or anytime you want to give your students some quality paragraph writing practice. Here is how it works…

Each week, my students get a writing prompt based on the genre we are currently working on in class (Narrative, Informational, or Opinion). With this writing prompt, my students are expected to brainstorm ideas, write the first draft, revise and edit their work, and rewrite a final copy. Here is an example timeline…

My Paragraph of the Week Activities must have a few key components.

A Writing Prompt – Writing prompts give students direction on where to go with their writing. I don’t like writing prompts that are just one or two sentences long. The prompts I give my students are high-interest and really get them thinking about the topic. A MUST!
Brainstorming – It’s only a paragraph, so I don’t require a huge planning sheet. However, I DO want my students to collect ideas on a topic before writing.
Reminders – If I want to reinforce what I am teaching in class, I must have a place that reminds my students what they should be working towards as they write.

Beyond the items I mentioned above, I also like to have some options for my struggling writers. In the picture above, you can see a 1st draft page with a checklist and spaces for the different parts of a paragraph. This is a handy tool for my strugglers, or for when students are still new to paragraph writing.

**As I teach my students different writing strategies in class, I expect them to incorporate these into their Paragraph of the Week assignment.

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The Benefits of “Paragraph of the Week”

After using this resource for a few weeks, I began to see my students’ quality of writing improve. They were now getting more opportunities to use the strategies I taught them in class, and they were benefiting from the weekly feedback they were getting from me. I found it much easier to provide individual feedback on a paragraph, rather than a long paper.

Another benefit of this homework was parental involvement. For the first time in my classroom, parents were seeing their child’s writing progress on a weekly basis. Typically I shared student writing a few times a year, or at the end of a unit. Now parents were able to get a “true” idea of how their child was doing throughout the entire year.

After using Paragraph of the Week in my own classroom, and seeing the benefits, I decided to put it all together and offer it in my Teachers Pay Teachers store. You can now get an ENTIRE year’s worth of Paragraph of the Week activities!!!

More About Paragraph of the Week

My Paragraph of the Week resource requires almost NO prep! Simply cut the sheets in half and you are done! Each genre is color-coded to help students know what they are writing. Also, ALL pages are completely EDITABLE. That means you can change ANY text you want. Plus, use the included template to make your own cards. 🙂

I now include 60 writing prompt cards that each come with a high-interest writing prompt, room for brainstorming, a reminder checklist, and a final drafting space.