3. What do you do to prepare students to write a paragraph? Do you teach them a specific lesson or skill?
We did do something in particular with this class in preparing to write essays. One of the components of the GED exam is to write a 200-word essay, and people are notoriously afraid of approaching that. So we start off with paragraphs, and we start off with the idea that they're going to write about [something] that they are familiar with, that they feel comfortable with, and that they feel knowledgeable about. So this particular class started off with me providing a main topic. The topic was telling your child that they can't have the car, and then [we] did a brainstorming discussion on reasons why. Then I used their very own words, their very own examples, and showed them how to work that into a paragraph that has a main idea and good supporting details, and [I] show them where the punctuation falls and how it's used. There is some explanation ahead of time before they're just expected to do something like that.
