Essay Writing Bootcamp

Trying to look tough!

Boxes and Bullets

We have spent the past two weeks in Essay Writing Bootcamp.  We wrote one essay collectively and students drafted their first essays individually.  Here’s how we did it:

• We generated some ideas by making observations and asking ourselves what that makes us think about.  We sat in different places inside and outside school to open our minds to new things. Next, we chose an idea that we could write a lot about and turned it into a statement. For example, in the essay we wrote together, we came up with the statement, Biking is fun.
• We used boxes and bullets to help us organize our thoughts and made a list of all of the things that make riding bikes fun.
• We combined some of the bullets that were alike and chose the top three that we could write about.
• We drafted a paragraph for each supporting reason and included a topic sentence.
• We looked at the work of others and noticed that their essays had an introduction and a conclusion so we went back to our journals and wrote our own.
• We made some revisions to our collective essay.  We thought about word choice and enhanced sentences to include lively verbs and adjectives.
• We used our language conventions (spelling, punctuation, paragraphing) to edit our work.

On Monday we will start the Fall Writing Prompt. Students will spend three days working on their essays following the same process that we practiced in “Boot Camp”.  They will be given a graphic organizer to help them organize their ideas before writing and a checklist to help them at the end.

Boxes and Bullets by MissB

4thGrade61SelfEditingChecklist by MissB