Thursday, September 14, 2023

Composition: Introduction to the Five Paragraph Essay

 Today our goal was to talk about our grant ideas and start learning about  Five Paragraph Essays.  There are six kids in the Co-op class all have different, outside writing assignments.  Really.  (One kid can only meet Tuesdays and another only Thursdays.  Another kid had to meet remotely this week.  Every teen belongs to different online schools with different requirements.  Fun, right? I spend time immediately after class doing updates and posting extensively to Classroom.)  

The parents from the Co-op met and made suggestions for the Composition class.  They requested using the class to improve student writing across the curriculum.  For example, one mom asked for her son to learn how to write science lab reports and paragraphs.  Another student is writing speeches for competitions.  Another teen is writing an essay comparing Xenophanes and Jesus for his philosophy class.  All the kids are working on an introductory paragraph.  Today, we talked about a ‘hook’ and format.  Essays should be in the third person, present tense, active voice, and indicative mood.  For example, one student and his sister are working on a grant proposal about chickens: building a coop, incubating eggs, and selling eggs as produce.  His grant proposal, Chickens Run, begins with, ‘ Hens are great animals for children.’, correctly written in the third person, present tense, active voice, and indicative mood.  

We had a bit of a discussion about active and passive voice.  ‘Zoe is being beaten to a pulp by her brother.’ is passive voice.  ‘Her brother is beating Zoe to a pulp.’ is active voice—both are present tense.  Subjunctive mood often begins with ‘If I were…’, such as ‘If I were a rich man’, from Fiddler on the Roof.  

We spent quite a bit of time testing different ideas for a hook for each paper.  If you have no idea how to start, start with a quote.  One, young teen, was unfamiliar with citations.  Purdue OWL has information and explanations about citations in MLA, Turabian, and APA styles.  (APA is used broadly at colleges.  Philosophy is generally a college course.  So the student studying philosophy is using APA.  The other are using either MLA or Turabian, as their online schools dictate.

Whew!  I am challenged teaching this class!  However, I’m also having a blast.  I hope this information is useful.  Xenophanes should have an ‘s’ on the board.  He was a philosopher.  Here is the set of Socrates’ Children.






No comments:

Post a Comment