As the parent, you play an important part in how well your child learns. One of the most significant subjects to focus on is writing. Regardless of the career path your child follows, writing will play an essential role. For now, let's take a quick look at tips and tricks for helping your child learn to create a five paragraph essay.
Step 1: How to Form a Paragraph
If your child is struggling with creating a single paragraph, creating a five-paragraph essay is going to seem like an astronomical task. This is why you must first focus on creating a single paragraph, and this starts with making sure your child understands how to develop structured sentences. Once your child can write in sentences, you can then move on to creating single paragraphs by following this helpful outline:
- Topic sentence
- Detail sentence 1
- Detail sentence 2
- Detail sentence 3
- Closing sentence
Step 2: Understanding the Structure of a Five-Paragraph Essay
Once your child can write a full paragraph, you'll then need to explain the structure of the five-paragraph essay. The first paragraph serves as an introduction for the entire essay, followed by three body paragraphs that provide supporting details for whatever topic was introduced in the introduction. The last paragraph then provides a short summary of the intro and body paragraphs.
Step 3: Create an Outline
Check out this simple-to-understand outline you can show to your child. This clearly explains each paragraph of the five-paragraph essay. It makes it incredibly easy to construct each paragraph independently and then combine them together to create the entire five-paragraph essay. When your child is writing their five paragraph essays make sure they are creating outlines of their own whenever they have the chance. This will give them a clear picture of what they want to talk about and how they want their essay to flow.
Step 4: The Introduction
The introduction is the most important part of a five-paragraph essay. If your child fails to grab the attention of readers in the intro, there's a good chance the rest of the essay won't even be read. This is why you should explain to your child how to hook the reader. Generally, it's fairly easy to hook the reader by sharing a memory or making some kind of emotional connection. Two other tips to hook the reader include asking a question or making some type of bold statement, with the latter being a thesis statement; this statement is a direct reflection of what the entire essay is about.
Step 5: The Closing
The final step in teaching your child how to create a five-paragraph essay is showing how to bring it all together in the closing, which is where the child restates the thesis statement and provides a few supporting details from the essay to conclude why the reader should agree with the statement being made in the thesis.
