Group items tagged

Exercise to use with your smartboard to teach/practice paragraphing and topic sentence identification

Curious about how complex your documents or Web pages are to read? You don't have to get a team of experts to generate your readability score: you can just use readability.info to analyze the characteristics of your writing and ascertain a multitude of readability scores. By comparing the readability score of different documents (or Web pages) you can better hone your writing and make sure that you aren't creating overly complex sentences and paragraphs for your audience.

First, writers will search for all four pieces of advice that young author, Eva, receives from her neighbors and then uses in her story found in the book Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street. Next, writers will apply the four pieces of advice as they brainstorm details about a person, place, and thing they have chosen to write about. Finally, writers will each create a descriptive paragraph that interestingly describes the person, place, and thing they have chosen.

Resource for lesson in book: Non-fiction Craft Lessons pg. 93: Making Transitions Between Paragraphs