These different tips will help students write good essays in elementary school.
Think about what kind of essay to write
Write down the most important characteristics:
- factual (report, reviews, synopses, descriptions)
- embellishing adjectives (picture stories, charming word stories, narratives)
- precise details (reports, descriptions, retellings)
- what tense?
- What is the structure of the essay?
Think of a descriptive heading that fits the essay form "A Terrible Experience" is more appropriate for a story or narrative. For a report or description, "The accident" would be better.
Make a list of different sentence beginnings. Then you can easily choose the appropriate ones later.
Finally, read through the essay again and think about:
- a) Does the text fit the assignment?
- b) Are points 1-3 taken into account?
- c) Have I chosen varied sentence beginnings?
Sentence starters in essays
Sentence starters are often a challenge even for skilled writers. Often, when following your thoughts, you do not notice that sentence beginnings are repeated. Children in particular lack the appropriate vocabulary. To make life a little easier for your students, you should work with them on different sentence starters and write them down. These can then be printed on cards and stored in the pencil case. This way, the children always have a selection of sentence starters at hand and can memorize them permanently. The same can be done with synonyms for important words such as:
Living things, objects and verbs. You can also find numerous worksheets on the topic of vocabulary expansion in elementary school.
A selection of sentence starters is, for example: but, before, suddenly, afterwards, then, only, now, now, later, thereupon, all at once, finally, with it, finally, ending, supplementing, at the end, first of all, last, just, here, this, that was,...
Alternatively, you can use sentence starters and synonyms to create wall posters for the class.
Vocabulary - the basic building block for successful essays
In order for children to be able to successfully write essays from the 2nd school year onwards, the foundation for this must be laid in the first school year and before. In the meantime, vocabulary expansion has become the be-all and end-all. Due to a variety of circumstances, the vocabulary of children today is becoming massively impoverished. In this context, the frequent playing of radio plays must also be viewed critically. In contrast to reading aloud or even reading oneself, there is no need to deal with individual words. Radio plays are usually played alongside children's play or to help them fall asleep. The child's play, however, already demands the child's concentration, so that the individual words cannot be registered at all during additional listening to audio plays.
The situation is comparable when working with music. Music does not have to interfere with work. On the contrary. Many people work better with music in the background. BUT... who works concentrated, does not know afterward simply, what he heard. Often you don't even notice the difference between music and moderation phases, news or the weather report. Children experience the same thing with radio plays. They enjoy the background noises and know that their favorite story is playing, but they do not perceive the individual words as words. However, when used correctly, radio plays and television can also expand children's vocabulary.
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Practice material for essays
In order to introduce children to the topic of essays and to improve their writing skills, a wide variety of tasks should be worked on. The scope of the tasks in the textbooks is usually not sufficient for this. That's why we offer a wide variety of printable assignments on the topic of essays. Children can work on essay structures and tips for writing essays. In addition, the individual parts of an essay can be practiced separately. Of course, there are also sample essays and suggestions for the task "Write an essay about..." here.
Related Resources:
Peculiarities of academic writing in English
Basic requirements for academic papers
Typical mistakes in scientific papers - and how to avoid them
What are the difficulties in writing essays for elementary school students?
