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ELA 4: Paragraph Writing 443 Views


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Description:

Today we're going to learn about paragraph hamburgers. They're vegan, calorie-free...and also not food. Sorry to get your hopes up.

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:04

[Coop and Dino singing]

00:13

We know that learning about grammar and sentence structure and paragraphs and all things English… [Teacher pointing to chalkboard]

00:17

can get a little bit boring.

00:19

So we can only imagine your excitement to hear that we're going to be discussing hamburgers today!

00:24

Paragraph Hamburgers! [Teacher holding a dish with a hamburger]

00:26

Okay, that might have been misleading. Sorry if we got your hopes up.

00:30

Imagine we were given a bunch of ingredients, like a bun, a patty, some lettuce, a slice

00:35

of tomato, and a few condiments. [Woman holding board of ingredients]

00:37

If no one ever showed us what a burger looked like or how to make one, we’d have no idea

00:40

what to do, and might end up with some disastrous results.

00:44

The same can be said about writing a paragraph: it's easy to do, but only once we’ve been [Car drives up to fast food window]

00:48

taught how to do it.

00:50

To start with, we need a topic sentence. We can think of this as the top bun, ready to

00:55

hold everything else together.

00:56

The topic sentence is where we state what our paragraph is all about. [Coop teaching about topic sentences]

01:00

It helps to organize our ideas,

01:02

and we always want everything else in the paragraph to be related to this topic sentence.

01:06

So, if we were writing a paragraph about how we think that every house in America should

01:10

be made of chocolate, our topic sentence might look something like this: [Man walks up to chocolate house]

01:14

“Americans should build their houses out of chocolate.”

01:17

Concise and to the point. Not to mention a truly awful idea. But an idea nonetheless. [Man chewing side of a chocolate house]

01:22

After we have our bun assembled, we need to add the patty and condiments.

01:26

Think of these different condiments as our supporting details.

01:29

Remember, all of our supporting details need to refer back to our original topic sentence.

01:33

So our details might look something like this:

01:35

Detail #1: Chocolate is delicious and looks beautiful, too.

01:40

Detail #2: Chocolate can be sculpted into any shape imaginable.

01:44

Detail #3: No one would ever go hungry if every house was made of chocolate.

01:48

Finally comes the bottom bun, which supports everything in the middle. [Bottom bun lands on plate]

01:52

This bottom bun in our paragraph is the concluding sentence.

01:55

This concluding sentence will be sort of similar to our topic sentence, but should aim to summarize [Dino discussing concluding sentences]

01:59

everything we've said in the paragraph in one clearly worded statement.

02:02

In this case, our concluding sentence could look like this:

02:05

“For these reasons, it's a no-brainer that America would be a better place if we used

02:08

chocolate to build our homes.”

02:10

So there you have it: the “burger” method to writing a paragraph.

02:13

Start with a topic sentence that explains your paragraph, follow it up with several [Arrows pointing to ingredients for paragraph and a burger]

02:16

details that support your topic sentence, and then make a concluding statement that

02:20

re-states the topic sentence in a new way.

02:25

But please, we beg you, don’t build yourself a chocolate house.

02:28

On the first day of summer, you’ll thank us. [Man stood outside a melting chocolate house]

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