Paragraphs 5

Paragraphs 5

Online interactive
Overview
Using this Resource
Connecting to the Curriculum
Marking Student Responses
Working with Students
Further Resources
This task is about identifying the main parts of a paragraph.

Question Change answer

a) Jonathan wrote a paragraph to describe the countryside around the house where he used to live.
The sentences are jumbled up.  Drag them into the right order.
  • from-here-p5-2.png
  • around-the-p5-2.png
  • I-loved-p5-2.png
  • sheep-and-p5-2.png
  • it-was-p5-2.png
  • the-countryside-p5-2.png

Question

Here is Jonathan's paragraph.

 

The countryside around my old house was beautiful. Lush hedgerows bordered the roads that meandered from village to village. Open fields, dotted with sheep, stretched away as far as the eye could see. From my bedroom window, I had a clear view of a nearby lake ringed by weeping willows, which were soft green in summer and spiky brown in winter. It was an inspiring place to live.

 

b)  Read the paragraph again, then decide whether the sentence below is a topic sentence, a supporting sentence, or a summary sentence.

 

Lush hedgerows bordered the roads that meandered from village to village.

    • Topic sentence

    • Supporting sentence

    • Summary sentence

Question

The countryside around my old house was beautiful. Lush hedgerows bordered the roads that meandered from village to village. Open fields, dotted with sheep, stretched away as far as the eye could see. From my bedroom window, I had a clear view of a nearby lake ringed by weeping willows, which were soft green in summer and spiky brown in winter. It was an inspiring place to live.

 

c)  Decide whether this sentence is a topic sentence, a supporting sentence, or a summary sentence.

 

It was an inspiring place to live.

    • Topic sentence

    • Supporting sentence

    • Summary sentence

Question

The countryside around my old house was beautiful. Lush hedgerows bordered the roads that meandered from village to village. Open fields, dotted with sheep, stretched away as far as the eye could see. From my bedroom window, I had a clear view of a nearby lake ringed by weeping willows, which were soft green in summer and spiky brown in winter. It was an inspiring place to live.


d)  Decide whether this sentence is a topic sentence, a supporting sentence, or a summary sentence.

 

Open fields, dotted with sheep, stretched away as far as the eye could see.

    • Topic sentence

    • Supporting sentence

    • Summary sentence

Question

The countryside around my old house was beautiful. Lush hedgerows bordered the roads that meandered from village to village. Open fields, dotted with sheep, stretched away as far as the eye could see. From my bedroom window, I had a clear view of a nearby lake ringed by weeping willows, which were soft green in summer and spiky brown in winter. It was an inspiring place to live.

 

e)  Decide whether this sentence is a topic sentence, a supporting sentence, or a summary sentence.

 

The countryside around my old house was beautiful.

    • Topic sentence

    • Supporting sentence

    • Summary sentence

Question 1Change answer

g)  Choose one of the topics below and write a paragraph to describe the topic to a reader. Make sure your paragraph has a topic sentence, two or more supporting sentences, and a summary sentence.
 
  • Your favourite meal
  • A character from a book, movie or television programme
  • A favourite place in your community, such as a local park or shopping mall

Question

The countryside around my old house was beautiful. Lush hedgerows bordered the roads that meandered from village to village. Open fields, dotted with sheep, stretched away as far as the eye could see. From my bedroom window, I had a clear view of a nearby lake ringed by weeping willows, which were soft green in summer and spiky brown in winter. It was an inspiring place to live.

 

f)  Decide whether this sentence is a topic sentence, a supporting sentence, or a summary sentence.

 

From my bedroom window, I had a clear view of a nearby lake ringed by weeping willows, which were soft green in summer and spiky brown in winter.

    • Topic sentence

    • Supporting sentence

    • Summary sentence

Question 1Change answer

Now check your writing.
Read through your paragraph carefully. Use the following questions to help you edit your paragraph.
 
Have I written a clear topic sentence that tells the reader what the paragraph will be about?
Have I written one or more supporting sentences that provide detail about my main idea?
Have I written a summary sentence that rounds off the paragraph and refers back to my main idea?
Task administration: 
This resource is ideal for students to work through independently after working with the teacher on Paragraphs 1. 
Levels:
4, 5
Curriculum info: 
English, Creating meaning, Writing
Key Competencies: 
Thinking, Using language, symbols, and texts
Keywords: 
paragraphs, organisation, topic sentences
Description of task: 
This task is about identifying the topic sentence, supporting sentences, and summary sentence in a paragraph of description.
Curriculum Links: 
This resource can be used to help to identify students’ ability to create texts to meet the writing demands of the New Zealand Curriculum. \

Links to the Literacy Learning Progressions for Writing:

This resource helps to identify students’ ability to:

  • choose effective content, language, and text structure
  • create content that conveys ideas relating to the topic with some details
  • organise their writing into paragraphs in which the ideas are clearly related
  • use organising devices such as topic sentences
as described in the Literacy Learning Progressions for Writing at: http://www.literacyprogressions.tki.org.nz/The-Structure-of-the-Progressions.
Learning Progression Frameworks
This resource can provide evidence of learning associated with
Using writing to think and organise for learning, set 4
Using writing to think and organise for learning, sets 5-6
Writing meaningful text: text features, set 5
Writing meaningful text: text features, sets 5-7
within the Writing Learning Progressions Frameworks.
Read more about the Learning Progressions Frameworks.
Answers/responses: 
This is one of a group of five paragraph resources about paragraph structure. The resources focus on identifying and writing topic sentences, supporting sentences, and summary sentences. The resources also support students to compose their own paragraphs for a range of writing purposes: to describe, to explain, and to persuade. 
This group of resources was trialled with groups of students in Year 7 and Year 8. 
 
Paragraphs 5

This resource focuses on descriptive paragraphs. Students re-arrange the sentences of a jumbled paragraph. They then identify whether each sentence in the paragraph is a topic sentence, a supporting sentence, or a summary sentence. They use this knowledge to compose their own descriptive paragraph.

 
The table below shows the difficulty levels of the various tasks, based on the results of this trial.
 
Task Student response Y7/Y8
a)
Ordering a jumbled paragraph – countryside
All sentences in correct order – difficult
b)
Supporting sentence ‘Lush hedgerows …’
Very easy
c)
Summary sentence ‘It was an inspiring …’
Very easy
d)
Supporting sentence ‘Open fields …’
Easy
e)
Topic sentence ‘The countryside …’
Easy
f)
Supporting sentence ‘From my bedroom …’
Easy
Teaching and learning: 
Task Student response Y7/Y8 Next steps
a)
 
Ordering a jumbled paragraph – the countryside
Many students were able to identify suitable topic and summary sentences, but found it difficult to arrange the supporting sentences so that the paragraph flowed logically.
 Work as a group to re-order the sentences in this or other paragraphs. Discuss the effect of various choices.  Each student could suggest an order and present it to the other group members, giving reasons for their choice. As a group, decide on the order that you think works best.
Focus on the words within a paragraph that provide cohesion – words that act as links between sentences, such as pronouns, connectives, and words that are repeated. Identifying these will help students to see the flow of ideas that connects parts of the paragraph.

b), c), d), e), f)
 
Identifying topic, supporting, and summary sentences.
Students had more difficulty identifying supporting sentences than topic or summary sentences.
 Work with a variety of paragraphs from different text types. As a group, can you identify the supporting sentences?  What different kinds of information and structures do writers use to provide supporting details? What words signal that this sentence is providing extra detail to support the main idea (look for words like ‘such as’ or ‘for example’)?
Delete one or more supporting sentences from paragraphs of text. Can students fill in the gap with an appropriate sentence or sentences?
g)
Constructing own paragraph
Some students wrote topic sentences that were a mixture of topic sentence and supporting sentence, for example ‘Bart Simpson is my favourite character because he has a sling shot and rides a skateboard and does pranks on Mr Skinner’.
Co-construct a paragraph as a class: different groups could try writing the topic sentence, a supporting sentence, or a summary sentence. Put the paragraph together and, as a group, decide how to edit the paragraph so there is a logical flow of ideas. Focus on ways of linking sentences, for example by using pronouns, connectives, repeated words or synonyms.
 
Students could then work in pairs to construct and review paragraphs. 
The resource, Thinking about How Language Works, provides useful additional information for teachers about aspects of language.  Part two, connecting and tracking ideas in text, is particularly useful when thinking about cohesion and flow within paragraphs.
 
The following ARB resources are about paragraphs and paragraph structure: