I think practicing the three paragraph essay is a great idea. Three quickn beginner topics are: my family. Paragraph 1: my dad is nice.
Paragraph 2: my mom is nice. Paragraph 3: my siblings are nice.
Give a few supporting sentences for the topic sentence in each paragraph. Voila! An essay. An excercize on quickly expanding on an idea while presenting a uniform topic.
Snipped from someone's post in a homeschooling forum:
He wrote only non-fiction for this – he wrote, for example, about the food of Peru (drinks, entrees, and desserts), Newton's Three Laws (a really perfect choice for beginning 3 body paragraph essay writers), and pugs (history, health, and dressing them)
I'm going to use these ideas for future three paragraph essay topics in the near future.
Here is an online ruberic, a checklist of things you can look for to provide specific feedback on the paper about what they can do to improve the quality of their writing. Obviously dont criticize their paper and try to make them perfect all in one lesson. But if you know what direction you want to go because you understand the points that the ruberic makes then you can use each paper to point out another way that good writers write better (using the ruberic) and to point out where your kid applied a previous lesson to the current assignment. Success! Yay!!!
http://www.rcampus.com/rubricshowc.cfm?sp=yes&code=Z37232&
