Paragraphing...BACKWARDS: A Five Day Lesson Plan

     I am very proud of my students and the volume of writing they are now able to produce in a single setting. Most of them can routinely write more than one full page.  But with this dramatic increase in volume often comes a lack of punctuation.  In addition as the length of students' stories increases, the skill of paragraphing becomes even more important.
     Most resources about paragraphing are instruction before students begin writing.  There are all sorts of graphic organizers and hamburger diagrams.  I decided to tackle paragraphing after students have written.  By teaching about paragraphing after writing, I can also tackle issues like elaboration and end punctuation, which are still important skills that students lack.
     For the first paragraphing lesson, I copied some pages from the book we are currently reading.  I tell the students the main reasons for paragraphing:  changes in speaker, time, and place.  I used Whole Brain Teaching techniques with pair teaching and gestures to help students remember the reasons for paragraphing.  Using the text selection and highlighters (kids love those), I had my students highlight the three reasons for paragraphing in three different colors.  They did this in pairs. 
     The next day, I gave students a piece of writing I wrote without paragraphs.  Again in pairs, students discussed where the paragraphs should be.  As a class we shared our ideas, making sure to justify our conclusions. 
     On Day #3 it was time for students to begin revising their own writing.  I used Lucy Calkins "box" technique.  In this technique, students draw a box with colored markers around their paragraphs.  Students worked with pairs.  Once students make boxes around their paragraphs, I asked them to count the number of sentences in each box.  For their assignment during Writing Workshop, students need to add some detail sentences to any paragraph that has less than four sentences.  Since students write on every other line in their daybooks, it is relatively easy to add detail sentences.  I collected the daybooks and sorted students by those who were struggling with paragraphing and elaboration and those that were not. 
     The following day, I met with the students who were struggling the most for extra assistance.
     On the final day of the week, I had students choose a section of text and rewrite it for evaluation.  They had to take at least two consecutive paragraphs and rewrite them.  I went over the assessment rubric prior to the assessment.  Students had to be able to show at least two paragraphs of a minimum of four sentences each, correctly punctuated.