LESSON PLAN 

Grade: 10        Unit: Six Traits            How Long: 90 mins
Class: English        Lesson: #2                Date: N/A

I.    Essential Question: How does organization help your audience understand your writing?

II.    State Core: 2.3a: Organizational patterns 

III.    Technology: 

IV.    Rationale: Organization helps student to arrange their thoughts and ideas in a manner that is more clear to an audience. The 5-Paragraph essay is simplified format for students to organize their writing.  

V.    Objective: Students will illustrate their understanding of organization by writing a five paragraph essay in class about whether or not it is easier to be a boy or a girl.  

VI.    Pre-Requisite Learning: This lesson will be based on the assumption that students have written papers previously. 

VII.    Preparation:
    a.    Teacher: Have assigned the recipe re-write assignment
    b.    Student: Have a copy of the recipe re-write assignment 

VIII.    Materials: N/A 

IX.    Instructional Process
    a.    Cue Set: Ask students what recipes they wrote and have a few read them aloud. Ask what would happen if you changed the order or the instructions? Would all of the recipes make sense? Would some of them turn out wrong?
    b.    Instructional Process
        i.    Ask the student to think about how important organization is in our society. What would happen if nobody cared about order? What would happen if organization was not important to anyone?
        ii.    Tell the students that organization in writing is vital and it is another of the Six Traits we are learning. If we don’t write in an organized way, our reader won’t understand what we wrote and may not even finish reading our work.
        iii.    Tell the students that there are different way to organize different types of writing.
            1.    How did you organize your recipe? (Have a student draw out the formatting for a recipe on the board)
            2.    How do we organize a letter? (Have a student draw out the basic formatting of a letter on the board)
            3.    In this class we will use the 5-paragraph essay format to write our essay papers or writing where we explore ideas or explain our opinions about a matter.
        iv.    Have students take notes on the following
        v.    First comes the Introduction (draw the top of a hamburger bun and write introduction inside)
            1.    Think of the first few minutes of a movie or chapters of a book. If it is boring or uninteresting, what do you do? Do you want to spend more time with it?
                a.    The first part of your introduction needs to capture your readers, we call this the hook. Write “hook” as a point coming off of the bun.
                b.    What could we use for a hook? (Quote, story, power sentence, interesting though, etc)
                c.    If we were writing an essay about why peanuts are better than almonds, what are some hooks we could use? (“With a salty crunch and delightful curves, the peanut is irresistible.”)
            2.    After your hook, your introduction, needs to “introduce” your topic. Let the reader know what you are going to be discussing. Help me finish out my paragraph about peanuts. (“Since the early days of the American Indian, people have been eating and loving peanuts….”)
            3.    Somewhere in your introduction, you need to have a thesis. Write “thesis” as a point coming off of the bun
                a.    What is a thesis? (the idea that you are trying to prove, explore, or argue in the essay)
                b.    Everything in your essay should point your reader back to thesis. The thesis is your goal in a way.
                c.    What is the thesis we are working on in our peanut essay (Peanuts are better than almonds.)
                d.    Then let your reader know how you are going to prove your thesis. Write three points coming off of the word “thesis” on the board. Tell me three reasons the peanut is better than the almond (1. it is cheaper; 2: it isn’t as hard; 3. there is two peanuts per shell)
            4.    Now, take each of your reasons and give them each a paragraph to explain why your reason proves your thesis.
                a.    Lets start with the argument-what is it that we are trying to prove? (That peanuts are better than almonds because they are cheaper)
                b.    Then what do you think our topic sentence would be? A topic sentence is what you are trying to prove in a single paragraph. It is sort of like the paragraph’s thesis. Draw something in the middle of the hamburger (below bun) and write “Topic #1” and write “topic sentence” as a point off of it. (Peanuts are better than almonds because they are cheaper.)
                c.    Now lets try to write a short paragraph to prove our first point.
                d.    Do this same process with the next two points
            5.    Finally, we have to finish up our essay. We need to explain to our reader how we proved our thesis.
                a.    Draw the bottom half of the bun on the board and write “Conclusion”
                b.    The conclusion summarizes what we already talked about, so you are proving the same points that you already did, but you are not saying the same thing over again. Write “summarize” as a point off of “Conclusion”
                c.    Make sure you don’t argue new points in your conclusion, you are just reminding the reader what you already said.
                d.    Restate your thesis, but you don’t have to quote it. You want to help your reader again see that you proved your point.
        vi.    Have students take out a couple of sheets of paper. Give them several minutes to write a 5-Paragraph essay about whether it is easier to be                 a boy or a girl. Remind them that you also will be looking for the things that we talked about previous (fluency and conventions).
                c.    Closure: Have the students take their essays home to type. Remind students of the importance of organization in writing. Organization helps us follow one idea to the next. Can you imagine if we ate a hamburger that was inside out? What would happen? Writing feels just as messy to the reader if ideas and arguments are out of order.
                d.    Independent Practice: Students will finish and type their 5-paragraph essays to bring to class the following period.  

X.    Evaluation: Students will be graded on the organization of their 5-paragraph essays as well as the fluency we discussed previously. The paper score will be low, because this is a practice activity and not a perfection activity. 

XI.    Enrichment: I want the students to take with them the idea that they can’t just write whatever wherever they want. They need to have it thought out logically and they need to write it in a format that a reader can easily follow. 

XII.    This lesson uses visuals to help ELL students as well as visual learners. The lesson also requires note taking to help aid in student memory of the concept.