The Five Paragraph Essay

Abstract: A short, free, authentic classroom professional development video on teaching essay writing. Students learn how to write an essay, how to: brainstorm ideas for the topic they are presented with, organize the ideas, write a topic sentence, and write an introductory and concluding paragraph. They also learn what to expect in the testing situation, for example, that the topic is given, that they have to brainstorm ideas without getting blocked, and that they will not have time to draft and re-copy a final essay. Although the GED 2014 series exam does not include a writing test as such, some of the strategies may be useful for the writing sections of the exam. Also, this approach may be useful for other high school equivalency exams such as the TASC and the HiSET. In this lesson students are given this topic: What qualities do you think make up a good employer? Write an essay that identifies the qualities you think a good employer has, giving specific examples to back up your ideas.-