From Sentence to Paragraph: A Peek Inside Our Writing Routine

Sara

Hey, teachers, welcome back to the podcast. We are in the third week of our special writing series that we’re doing this summer, which goes along with our summer book study, The Writing Revolution. This week on the podcast, we’re talking all about paragraph writing. But rather than making this a solo episode, I invited one of our Stellar Teacher teammates, Kori, who is our primary curriculum lead. She’s going to share some of her biggest aha moments from reading through The Writing Revolution 2.0, some of her best tips for paragraph writing, and how the book impacted the way she thought about creating new resources for our audience. I hope you enjoy this conversation—let’s jump right in.

Hi, Kori. I am so glad that you are joining me on the podcast today.

Kori

Hello! I’m happy to be here.

Sara

So you all may not be familiar with Kori from a podcast standpoint, but I promise you know Kori because she is our primary curriculum creator. You’ve been with STC since, what—2021? So for four years now, and you’ve made some of our most popular resources—all of our writing resources. You’ve helped develop our small group lessons, our whole group lessons, our seasonal resources… I mean, I feel like, yeah, anything that has come out in the last four or five years, you’ve been a huge part of it.

Kori

Yeah, yeah.

Sara

So I’m super excited to have you on today to talk about some of the recent writing resources we’ve created and to share the thinking that goes into creating a resource—especially our writing resources. You’ve talked a lot about how you were as a writing teacher, and I’m curious: What were you like as a writing teacher, and how did that classroom experience contribute to the resource creation process? So when you think about our Sentence Writing Routine and our Paragraph Writing Routine, how did your classroom experience impact how you think about creating writing resources?

Kori

Yeah, so it’s interesting you ask this question because I think the impact goes far beyond just me as a writing teacher—it actually starts with me as a writing student. A lot of my inspiration, especially now as a curriculum creator, comes from the writing experiences I had as a student.

That being said, I did enjoy teaching writing. I was definitely aware that it was difficult for a lot of students, and—disclaimer—I did not teach it in the best way when I was in the classroom. I’m sure many people have that experience. But one thing I did do right was that I tried to incorporate writing into all content areas. Because I enjoyed writing so much, it was just natural for me to bring it into whatever I was teaching.

In my last few years in the classroom, I was departmentalized and taught fourth-grade ELA. It was in that setting that I really started breaking down paragraph writing throughout the week. We would work on each part of the writing process one day at a time. I saw that it worked for my students—though at first, it didn’t. They were like, “What are we doing? This doesn’t make sense.” But after a while, they realized, “Oh, day one leads us to day five.” During that time, I realized students really need to work on things one sentence at a time, and I had that aha moment. I brought a lot of that experience into my curriculum creation work when I started creating for Stellar.

Sara

For sure. And I know this has come up before, but your experience as a writing student is such a good reminder to teachers that how students experience writing as students can have a lasting impact on how they view themselves as writers in the future. I remember when our team read through The Writing Revolution 2.0, we were talking about the note-taking section, and pretty much everyone on our team said, “I was never taught how to take notes.” And you were like, “I was!”

So we all had really different experiences learning how to write—and as a result, I mean, I know you see yourself as a writer, probably because you had a teacher who was really good at teaching writing. So I don’t know… no pressure, teachers out there, but the way we teach writing really does have an impact on how students ultimately see themselves.

 

Kori

Yeah, and I think to speak on that too—when I think back to being a writing student, I was always encouraged to be creative, and writing was also presented as an artistic outlet. I remember it being fun. I’m also aware that I had some natural writing ability, so things came easier to me—especially when we learned about grammar and things like that. But I was really drawn to writing, and I had teachers who encouraged it.

Definitely, going through The Writing Revolution with the team, I was like, “Whoa.” We went to very different schools, obviously—we’re from all over the country—but I had a very different experience being taught how to write.

Sara

Yeah. So speaking of The Writing Revolution 2.0, we’re working our way through it as part of our summer book study. I’d love to know—since you read both the first and second versions—and while reading the second version you were also in the process of developing resources, how did that book really change the way you thought about teaching paragraph writing? And as a result, how did it change the way you developed some of the resources for paragraph writing?

Kori

Yeah, I think naturally as a classroom teacher, I knew students needed grammar and sentence structure support, but I didn’t know how to teach it other than in isolation—and I didn’t receive any support. Nobody taught me how to teach writing when I went to college. None of that.

So this book was the aha moment for me. I was like, “Oh, this is how I should have been doing it in the classroom.” It just really made sense. It also helped me see the many ways we can help students better understand how to write. There’s not just one way. There isn’t a single “right” answer. I think there are research-backed strategies that we should be implementing, and I loved the idea of connecting writing to content. That felt so natural—that was a big aha moment for me as well.

I think the biggest thing is that it reminded me: we need to start at the starting line, not the finish line. We want our students to write paragraphs and essays—that’s the goal. So we’re often thinking, “How do we get them to do that?” But paragraphs and essays are made up of sentences. If students can’t formulate sentences, they’re not going to reach the finish line.

The book helped me understand how important it is for students to know all the parts and pieces that make up a sentence. And in doing so, their reading comprehension is going to improve as well.

 

Sara

I love that analogy—the idea of not starting at the finish line. We so often start our instruction with what we want our students to do at the end, forgetting that there are all these small steps that need to happen first.

So a few years ago, you developed what we now refer to as our classic paragraph writing routine—which so many of our teachers love. So many teachers talk about how this resource helps their students, even the most reluctant writers, confidently create a paragraph. Can you briefly walk us through that routine and explain how it helps students develop strong paragraph writing skills?

Kori

Yeah, so I actually created this after we had read the original version, but I still relied more on what I did in the classroom. The classic routine is essentially how I taught writing when I was in fourth grade, and I also used it when I taught seventh grade.

It follows the six steps of the writing process that we’re often familiar with—and that our students are usually familiar with. We have brainstorming, and I added outlining, which was inspired by The Writing Revolution. Then we have drafting, revising, editing, and publishing.

I think it’s broken down into steps that are manageable for both teachers and students. It’s one way that writing can be taught. And then a couple of things happened. We released it out into the world, we saw it was really helpful, but we also got feedback that it was still too much for some students.

Then I started reading The Writing Revolution 2.0, and I realized—oh, okay—we can totally break this down even more.

 

Sara

Which is funny, right? Because when I was in the classroom, we would write a paragraph—or even multiple paragraphs—in a single day. So just the idea that we’re going to slow down paragraph writing over the course of a week wasn’t something I ever did in the classroom. Obviously, I think that’s a much more effective way.

But then realizing that even writing a paragraph over the course of a week in six steps can be too much—there are actually a lot of other things that can happen before we even try to write the paragraph. Again, this idea of not starting with the end goal.

Kori

Yeah, and I think too, something that is trickier for me when creating curriculum—specifically writing curriculum—is that because it comes naturally to me, I often think I’ve broken it down enough or given enough direction so that the teacher and student will understand. But reading the book, I was like, “Oh, wait. There are even more ways we can break this down, make it into bite-sized pieces, scaffold, and differentiate.”

So, reading the newest version of the book and thinking about recreating a paragraph routine—I’m so glad it happened at the same time, because I’m really proud of what we’ve come up with. I think our new routine, which we’ll be releasing eventually, is still very much broken down. It’s going to be manageable steps. Obviously, it leads students to reach the end goal of writing a paragraph, but I feel like I spent a lot more time thinking about how to support the teacher.

We’ve added a lot more supports for helping the teacher who may not feel confident teaching writing, and I think they’ll see improvements with those supports. And ultimately, right, we’re trying to get student success—so there are more supports for students as well. And if you’re in our book study reading The Writing Revolution with us, I think you’ll totally see how all of that comes together.

 

Sara

Yeah, so Kori has been in the process of basically giving our paragraph writing routine a makeover. Rather than just having our classic routine—which was kind of a little bit generic—we now have a routine that is really differentiated for each grade level. But also, I think the really great part about this is that we’re connecting it to our reading lessons.

So many of the takeaways from The Writing Revolution too involve realizing that we don’t need to teach writing in a silo. We used to teach writing during the writing block, and it wasn’t connected to anything else. But now we can read something and use that as inspiration for our writing.

So this new paragraph writing resource we have coming out has so many more supports and scaffolds, and it’s connected to what teachers are already teaching and reading—which I think is a huge win in itself, absolutely.

One of the things I love that we’ve started doing as a curriculum team is beta testing our resources. So rather than coming up with an idea, creating it, and releasing it right away, we now come up with the idea, do a lot of research behind it—which is why Kori has been reading The Writing Revolution while creating this resource—and then before we mass produce it, we get feedback from teachers who are in the classroom and can use the resource with students.

We got to put our new paragraph writing resource through a beta test, which was so cool—to have teachers try out the new scaffolds and teacher supports and give us feedback. We got a lot of really great and helpful feedback, and we also got some really great questions.

One question sparked a conversation that we hadn’t really had yet. I know you and I had a conversation about it the other day, and I thought it was such a fascinating topic. The question had to do with imitation. Because we provided a lot of modeling and guided practice for teachers to use, one of the teachers shared in her feedback that she felt like her students were just copying or imitating the writing the teacher was doing as modeling. So she felt like the resource wasn’t really effective.

So can we talk for a little bit about the role of imitation in learning how to write? Is that something we should be avoiding, or is it something we can actually embrace?

 

Kori

Yeah, I’m so glad you brought this up. I feel very passionately about this now. A series of events happened—starting with the beta test—that really sparked my curiosity. Those feedback questions got me thinking more deeply about the writing process and other learning processes we go through.

Also, while that was happening, I was reading a book—A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver. I’ve been really into reading poetry lately. Mary Oliver is an American poet who writes both poetry and prose, often focused on nature and emotions. Her work is truly beautiful. She taught poetry at the college level, and her classes were so popular that she was encouraged to publish a book. It’s essentially about how to write poetry.

In her handbook, she has an entire section on imitation, and she talks about how important—and natural—that is. That’s the key thing: imitation is natural in any learning process. I loved how she talked about writing specifically, but also how she compared it to other types of learning where imitation plays a role.

She goes all the way back to childhood—when babies imitate sounds and actions they see. Walking is imitation. Sports involve imitation—learning from what your coach shows you. We are constantly learning by watching, modeling, and copying what we see.

She uses the example of an art class. As an art student, you might take a still-life drawing class. Everyone in the class sits around the same vase and engages in the same practice—drawing the vase. You’re all imitating the same object. But none of the drawings look exactly alike. Still, it’s the starting point. That imitation builds confidence and helps teach foundational knowledge—like the parts of a sentence or different sentence types. Students have to see it first.

I loved that all of this came together at the same time, because it made me realize something important. Thinking back to my own experience as a student—and even as a teacher—we often think of imitation as wrong. And that’s reinforced by society too, right? Copying is seen as bad. But I think there’s a different way to look at it—where imitation can actually be embraced and encouraged, especially as a foundation.

Consider a student who can’t yet write a sentence. If they write from a sentence stem on your board, and then finish it the same way you did during your modeling—that’s a huge step. And it should be celebrated rather than discouraged.

Sara

Yeah, I know when you brought this up—because I know we started talking about this at one of our curriculum meetings—we sort of realized, wait a minute, no, imitation does play, like you said, an important role in so many things that we do. I mean, since then, I’m like, okay, if you think about it, right? Anytime you learn to cook, you follow a recipe. Yes—imitation, right? Or you’re at an exercise class or a dance class—someone is literally telling you the moves to do. And as you become more confident in whatever skill it is, that’s when you get to put your own personal twist on it.

But you’re not going to start cooking, baking, exercising, or playing sports with, “Okay, do this whole thing on your own without any support or guidance.” We ultimately start with imitation. And I think that’s one of those things—it’s interesting, because I think in all the subjects in school, writing is the one area where we’re like, “No, you cannot imitate.” Right? Like in math, you get a formula to follow and imitate, step-by-step. But in writing, it’s like, “No, you can’t imitate. You have to come up with something on your own.” And maybe that’s not the right approach we should be taking.

Kori

I definitely think it’s not a good starting point. I want to encourage teachers to have conversations about this with their students. If copying comes up, that’s a door opening for you to talk to your students and say, “Okay, we’re learning how to write this sentence. We’re using details from the book—now how do we change it? How do we turn it into our own?” That’s encouraging them to use their own voice and engage in the full writing process.

In revision, they can add their own voice. They can use more precise language. They can take a long sentence and turn it into two short ones. It really was very eye-opening for me. And I think it’s just a pivot in the language and phrases we use around imitation and copying. If a student is trying, and they’re using a sentence stem and pulling details from a text—that’s huge. I think that’s a great sign that they want to learn, or they are trying to learn. And what we do with that is important.

Sara

Yeah, well, I think again, going back to the point that this is a starting point—throughout the year, if at the end of the year a student is still imitating and that’s where you’re ending, then okay, maybe we have some problems. But when you’re starting off—especially when a student is learning how to write sentences, how to write paragraphs, how to write essays, and you’re introducing new sentence structures—that’s how they’re going to learn. So to start with imitation is not necessarily a bad thing in writing.

Kori

I don’t think so. And I think it’s such a confidence builder. I can’t imagine a student who was never able to write a sentence or really struggled when a teacher told them, “Just write something,”—and then they were able to put a full sentence together, even if it was imitation. Imitation boosts that confidence, and then we get to teach them how to make it their own.

Sara

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. That was a really interesting conversation that came out of the beta test. I didn’t even think we’d be talking about that—but we were. And I think it’s a helpful thing for teachers to think about, absolutely.

Okay, so I’d love to chat through some of the most common questions we get from our audience when it comes to teaching paragraph writing. Something we hear frequently is that teachers really love to start the year using our sentence writing routine. But then they often want to know: How long should I work on sentences before moving into paragraph writing? What are your thoughts on that?

Kori

This is going to be an unpopular answer—there is no magic number. I think, coming off our previous conversation, you have to do what’s best for your students, and that’s going to look different for each classroom.

Another big takeaway I’ve had from creating all the writing resources I’ve worked on in the past few years—and also from researching and reading—is that we don’t have to have students at a point of mastery in order to introduce a new concept. They don’t need to master all sentence types or all grammar rules before being taught how to write a paragraph.

With that said, it’s still very important to continue focusing on sentence-level practice even while writing paragraphs. Don’t move from one to the other and forget all about the foundation.

Sara

Yeah, I think it’s like we have this tendency to want everything in education to be linear—where it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to teach this thing, and then as soon as I’m done with it, I’m teaching the next thing”—as opposed to thinking of things as more cyclical. I know something that came up quite a bit in The Writing Revolution 2.0 is how much of writing is recursive. You teach it, and then maybe take a break from it, and then come back to it. Sentence writing is one of those things where it’s not like we teach it for six weeks, then stop and only focus on paragraphs. We start with sentence writing, and at some point, we introduce paragraph writing, but we still continue to focus on sentence writing as we give our students more demanding writing tasks.

 

Kori

And I think, too, something to consider is—do they have the language to talk about a sentence? When they do, I think that can be a natural sign to you, like, “Okay, let’s add in paragraphs,” because that will feel more natural to them. But if they don’t know how to talk about sentences or write them, and now you’re asking them to write a paragraph too, it’s just a lot.

Sara

Absolutely. Another question we often get is how to transition students from paragraph writing to essay writing. Now, we don’t have a formal essay writing resource yet—it might be something we develop in the future. But teachers often say, “Okay, I loved your sentence writing resource. I loved your paragraph writing resource. And now, how do I help my students jump to essay writing?” What should teachers be doing, especially if they don’t have a resource that bridges paragraph writing to essay writing? And do you think they need to have a resource?

Kori

I think we tend to make this more complicated than it really is. I like to think of it this way: essays are made up of paragraphs, and paragraphs are made up of sentences. So once our students have a solid understanding of sentences and the structure of a paragraph, then you’ve essentially given them the formula and strategies they need to expand and write essays. And I think you can still break this up. If you’re writing a paragraph over the course of a week, then build your essay the same way. Start with an introduction paragraph, then move through the others. Of course, use models so students can see what an essay looks like from beginning to end. And as we talked about earlier, use outlines to help them build it paragraph by paragraph. Still break it down—don’t expect it to be done all at once. But really, it all starts with that sentence-level understanding.

Sara

Yeah, and I think sometimes we almost get nervous about the essay—it feels like this big thing. But everything we’ve been doing along the way to help students can be applied to essays. Talk through the structure of an essay orally before students write it. Write an essay as a class before having them do it independently. And to your point—if students feel confident with their ability to write a paragraph, all an essay is is a group of paragraphs. So break it down and say, “Okay, we’re going to write the introductory paragraph today. Tomorrow we’ll write the body paragraph,” and just really take it step by step.

Okay, last FAQ we often get has to do with differentiation. And I get it—teaching writing on its own is difficult. So the question becomes: how do we differentiate in both directions? How do we make writing more challenging for our really strong writers, and how do we make it more accessible for our struggling writers? What tips do you have for differentiating in both directions?

Kori

Yeah, so I’m going to start by saying—and if this is the permission you need, I hope it gives that—differentiation doesn’t always mean creating totally different assignments. It just means adjusting the level of support or the depth of thinking, right? I know when I was in the classroom, I felt pressured sometimes to create different assignments for all my different levels. But luckily, I moved out of that quickly and was able to see, okay, we can all work on the same assignment. What each student does, or what they need to get to that point, can look different. So for struggling writers, I think it’s all about simplifying the cognitive load. That could look like providing sentence stems or word banks—especially transition words or key vocabulary you want them to include. And this one can work for both levels, but definitely for some of those lower writers: allow them to talk about their writing before they start, and maybe just adjust the expectation. Maybe they just have to write a topic sentence and one detail to start.

For advanced writers, I think this is where teachers can get really hung up. But again, just increase the complexity of what they’re doing. Ask them to combine ideas—take two sentences and combine them into one—or challenge them to revise for sentence variety. Give them specific, precise language that they have to include. There are lots of ways you can do this without creating a completely new assignment.

Sara

Yeah, and I think again, for whatever reason, when we think of differentiation, we assume it has to be completely different. But I know even giving your students the same writing assignment—and we know that writing should be brought into our content areas—and it’s like, I know one thing we’ve really discussed is this idea that the content is what differentiates the writing, right? So, if you have students reading more complex texts, their summaries are going to be more complex than if a student is summarizing a very basic text. So even just differentiating what they’re writing about is an easy way to meet students wherever they are on the writing spectrum.

 

Kori

Absolutely. And I think to that point, you can still be writing about the same topic. You can still be writing about plant cycles, but everybody just has a different text they’re working from. So again, it doesn’t have to be completely separate ideas—it can just be the right level of text for students to be reading.

Sara

Yeah, absolutely. So last thing—so many teachers say that writing is an area where they just feel overwhelmed. They lack confidence. They just don’t know what to do. What is a little bit of encouragement you would offer to teachers who lack confidence when it comes to teaching writing?

Kori

I think—lean into that, right? And this may not be a popular opinion, but don’t be afraid to learn with your students. I think sometimes teachers feel pressured to be an expert in everything, and it’s okay if you’re not. Be honest with your students. Be curious with your students. I think the best thing I learned when I was in the classroom was not to be afraid to make mistakes, and I owned up to them, and we talked through it as a class. I think students really appreciate that honesty. They want to know that you’re learning too—and that’s okay. Especially with writing, which can be such a difficult subject, don’t be afraid to just learn with your students and be honest about it.

Sara

And I know that’s going to help so many teachers feel like, “Okay, I don’t have to be an expert. I can just get started and learn with my students.” So thank you for sharing that—and of course, thank you for joining us today. I know teachers love using the writing resources you’ve created with The Stellar Teacher Company, and I know they’re going to love hearing your perspective on paragraph writing as well.

Kori

Yeah, thanks for having me today.