From Sentences to Essays: The Writing Sequence That Works

Hey friend, welcome back to the podcast. We are getting ready to wrap up our Stellar Teacher Summer Book Study this week, which means we are also wrapping up our podcast series that we’ve been doing all about writing. Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked about rethinking our writing instruction, why sentences matter so much, and how to build strong paragraphs.

So now we’re going to wrap up this series by talking a little bit about how we can help our students write essays. I know this is a topic that many of you are interested in because you teach in states that require your students to write multi-paragraph essays at the end of the year. Hopefully, you get a little bit of encouragement, some strategies, and a clearer picture of how we can help our students achieve that goal by the end of the year.

Now, if you’ve missed any of the episodes in our writing series, feel free to go back and give them a listen. They start with episode number 256, and of course, they’re available for you to listen to whenever you have time.

Okay, so back to today’s topic: essays. I want to chat about how we can figure out when students are actually ready to write multi-paragraph compositions, because I think most of us are starting that process a little too soon. We’ll talk about why we don’t want to jump into essay writing too early, and then I’ll share a few scaffolds we can put in place so our students feel confident when they’re truly ready to write essays.

So again, whether you are a third, fourth, or fifth grade teacher, I think this episode is going to give you some clarity and a little bit of encouragement on how to approach essay writing in the coming year. Let’s go ahead and jump right in.

We started that pretty much from the first week of school. And I get it—state tests often expect students to write multi-paragraph responses, so as their teacher, we feel the pressure to make sure they’re prepared. We assume that if students have to write an essay at the end of the year, we should give them as much practice as possible throughout the year. It makes sense: if that’s the goal, then let’s start practicing right away.

We worry that if we delay essay instruction, it’s going to negatively impact our students. So we jump into essay development right at the start of the year. But here’s the thing I really want you to think about: if your students don’t have the foundation for multi-paragraph writing, then starting with essays is only going to lead to frustration and overwhelm—for both you and your students.

If our students don’t have a solid writing foundation—meaning they don’t know how to write strong sentences, they don’t understand how to organize a paragraph, and they don’t have strong revising skills—then just giving them more essay practice won’t make them better writers. They’ll stay stagnant.

I saw this all the time when I was a fourth-grade teacher. We started with essays, but my students didn’t improve—because they didn’t actually need help with essays. They needed help with sentences, paragraph writing, and outlining.

Think of writing like a hurdle race. You would never ask a runner to clear the very last hurdle first. Even thinking about that sounds ridiculous. It would feel impossible to them, and if you asked them to do it, they’d probably just stare at you and say, “No way. I can’t do that,” and give up without even trying. Because it is impossible to jump the last hurdle if you haven’t even crossed the starting line, right?

In writing, I think that’s kind of what we do when we start the year with an essay prompt. We’re telling our students, “Hey, we want you to write this essay. But you don’t know how to write a sentence, you don’t know how to organize a paragraph, and you don’t have any revision strategies—but go ahead and write this essay.” It’s the same as standing at the starting line and telling a runner to jump over the last hurdle. No big deal. And then we wonder why nothing is working with our students.

So we really want to shift our thinking around essay development. Rather than jumping into it right away, we want to hold off until we’ve spent significant time building a strong writing foundation. We say this a lot when it comes to writing—and I’ll say it again in this episode—we have to slow down to speed up. And we want to make sure we’re starting the year with that mentality.

And here’s something else that I really want you to consider: depending on the grade you teach, it might not even be developmentally appropriate for your students to be writing a multi-paragraph essay—especially at the start of the year. We have to remember that oftentimes our state tests are set up and structured in a way that is not always aligned with what is developmentally appropriate for our students. So even though the state tests require it, that doesn’t mean it’s what’s best for our students.

If you’re a third-grade teacher, multi-paragraph writing shouldn’t even be on your radar. Instead, you really want to focus on and prioritize building strong sentence-writing skills and helping your students become familiar with how to organize and develop a single paragraph. They should be able to leave third grade with strong confidence in their ability to write a single paragraph. Multi-paragraph writing shouldn’t even be a consideration.

Now, if you’re a fourth-grade teacher, multi-paragraph composition work is definitely something you can start to dabble in, but it should be done as a class—collectively. You’re introducing the process, so there should be a lot of modeling, guided practice, and support. We don’t want to start the year expecting independence, and if we even consider students writing multi-paragraph compositions independently by the end of the year, that should only come after they’ve had tons of support and class practice.

It’s really not until fifth grade that we should expect students to write longer, multi-paragraph compositions independently. And even then, we shouldn’t push students to write more just because they’re in fifth grade. We want to ask: are they ready? Have they had consistent practice with sentence writing and paragraph writing before jumping into multi-paragraph writing—even if they’re in fifth grade?

Now you might be thinking, okay, that’s fine. I can get behind the idea that it might be developmentally inappropriate to ask a third grader to write a multi-paragraph composition. But what if that’s what’s required on the state test, right? I get it. We can’t ignore the state tests. So if your students are required to write a multi-paragraph essay on a state test, we want to treat that as test prep—which means we save our multi-paragraph instruction until test prep season.

And honestly, test prep should only take about four to six weeks before the test, at most. So you shouldn’t even be thinking about multi-paragraph essays until well into the second semester. That might make you nervous, but I want you to think about this—especially if you’re an experienced teacher. If you’ve started the year with essays in the past and have never been happy with the results you’ve gotten, then it’s time to try something different.

That means holding off on essay development and really prioritizing building a strong writing foundation at the start of the year. So if you feel behind because your students aren’t writing essays in September, pause and remind yourself: you are not behind. You are actually doing it right. You are taking the time to build that strong foundation, and that is the most important thing you can do.

Prioritize instructional time for sentence-level work, outlining, organizing paragraph writing, and targeted revision practice. These are the things we really want to focus on during the first semester. And if you really lean into those four things and build a strong foundation with your students, they are going to make multi-paragraph writing so much easier later on. Because your students will understand the basics of writing. They’ll have that strong foundation. They won’t be struggling just to figure out how to write a complete sentence—because that skill will feel automatic to them.

We’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: you cannot write a strong essay without being able to write strong paragraphs. And you cannot write strong paragraphs unless you can write strong sentences and know how to outline and organize your thoughts. So spending time on the basics is exactly what you need to be doing if your end goal is multi-paragraph compositions.

So I know I’ve talked about these things on the podcast before—sentence writing, outlining, organizing, paragraph writing, targeted revision practice—but a few things that I think are important to keep in mind are that sometimes we want our instruction, especially our writing instruction, to be linear. And we tend to view it more like a checklist.

For example, we hear that we need to focus on sentence writing. So we think, okay, I’ll spend four to five weeks on sentence writing. I’ll teach it, cross it off my list, and then move on to paragraph writing. Then we’ll spend four to six weeks working just on paragraph writing, cross it off the list, and move on to the next thing.

But that’s really not how we want to approach our writing instruction. We don’t want to teach sentences at the start of the year and then never focus on them again. We really want our writing instruction to be recursive. That means we continue to revisit and provide repeated practice and instruction with these foundational skills over and over and over again.

It’s not like we only teach sentences at the start of the year and then move on. Once we introduce a writing skill, we want to constantly bring it back to the forefront of our instruction. We want sentence writing, outlining, paragraph writing, and targeted revision to be things that we are consistently cycling through and practicing with our students all year long.

Now, that might mean that during certain seasons—certain weeks or months—you’re going to give one of them more emphasis than the others. But we don’t want to teach something, cross it off our list, and move on to the next skill. We want to constantly be bringing these things up with our students.

Okay, so again, I know our ultimate goal is essay writing, but the reality is that there are a lot of sub-skills that have to be in place and proficient in order for students to get to that essay development. And outlining is one of those skills that is so important. It’s often, I think, an overlooked stage in the writing process.

Especially if we want our students to write essays, they have to be able to independently, confidently, and successfully create an outline. That’s because outlining gives your students structure. It gives their writing direction, and it gives them confidence in their ability to complete the writing task. It really helps them organize their ideas before they put pencil to paper. And we know that if students have a clear plan in front of them, writing is going to be so much less intimidating. It’s going to be easier to tackle, and honestly, it’s probably going to be a task they enjoy more.

So we want to think of outlining really as this bridge between sentence writing and paragraph writing, and then from paragraph writing to essay writing. It’s the step that really connects these skills. Once your students know how to write a single paragraph, if we can teach them to create an outline, then they’re just writing a series of single paragraphs that have connected ideas.

Before you have your students really jump into writing full-blown essays, we want to give them plenty of practice outlining essays. And this is something that I completely ignored. We jumped right into essay development. In my head, I thought the writing was the most important part—drafting was the most important part. So we would briefly talk about a brainstorm, briefly talk about an outline, and I wanted to give them more time writing.

But that’s not actually what’s going to make them better writers. There are so many scaffolds that you can put in place, and a lot of times they’re things that don’t even involve independent writing—but they will actually make your students better writers.

So when it comes to outlining, you want to make sure that you’re giving your students lots of practice. And we don’t want to make all of that practice be independent, either. It’s not just: “Here’s the topic, now independently create an outline.” Because again, if a student struggles with outlining, more independent practice isn’t going to make them better at it. We need to think about what scaffolds we can put in place.

So here are a couple of ideas for things that you could do to support students in becoming stronger outline writers.

So first is making sure you spend time creating an outline for an essay as a class. This could be for a prompt in writing, or it could be related to science or social studies. Whatever it is, you can give them the topic, and as a class, you’re going to develop the outline. You’re modeling, you’re getting their input, they’re working together—it’s a collaborative activity.

Now, you could also sort of work backwards. You could give your students a completed essay and have them deconstruct it to create an outline. So if they see a completed essay, can they easily identify the thesis statement? Can they identify the introduction? Can they identify the body paragraphs? Can they identify the topic sentence in each body paragraph? And basically work backwards—because if students can work backwards to create an outline, then it will be easier for them to work forwards as well.

Other things you could do include giving students the thesis statement and the topic sentence for each body paragraph and having them fill in the outline with the details. So we’re giving them the main points, and then saying, okay, here’s your thesis statement or here’s the topic sentence for each paragraph—what details might you include?

When you’re doing activities like this, it’s really important that you base them on content your entire class knows. If you’re going to ask them to fill out details about a topic, they need to have knowledge on that topic. So these would be really great activities to bring into science or social studies or connect to what you’re reading about, because then you can guarantee your students have the background knowledge.

Kind of the opposite of that, you could give students a collection of details and ask them to turn those details into an outline with a thesis statement. So now they’re having to organize the details and see which ones are connected and related, but we’re still giving them some support.

And of course, you can have students create outlines that never get turned into actual essays. They can practice outlining without going through the entire writing process. Since we know outlining is a skill that often gets overlooked—and it’s also something that probably doesn’t come naturally to a lot of our students—we really want to make sure we’re giving them targeted practice with it. We want to be intentional about asking: how are we helping our students become stronger outliners?

All that to say, students don’t need to take every single writing piece all the way through the writing process. There is a lot of benefit in just focusing on outlining and not taking those outlines all the way to the finish line. And honestly, that’s something I never did in my classroom. But thinking about it now, I’m like, yeah, we really could have benefited from just practicing outlining without having to do a draft.

Okay, so once your students really are ready for multi-paragraph compositions, one very specific strategy I want to share with you can help your students write the introduction. One thing I noticed in my classroom is that getting started is sometimes the hardest part for students. Once they get started, it becomes so much easier. And if we think about the introduction, it really sets the tone for the entire composition. It includes the thesis statement, so we want to make sure that it’s written correctly. Like I said, it sets up the writing to be successful.

A strategy you can teach them to write a really strong introduction—and this would even work for state tests—is called the GST strategy. That means you’re going to write a General statement, a Specific statement, and then your Thesis statement.

Here’s what it would look like in action. Let’s say your students are writing about why recess is important. Their first sentence is going to be a general statement. They might say, “Everyone needs a break during the day to rest and recharge.” Then the next sentence is going to be a little more specific: “For kids, recess is one of the best ways to take a break while also staying active.” And finally, they’ll write their thesis statement, listing out the key points they plan to develop in their essay: “Recess should be part of every school day because it helps students focus, stay healthy, and feel less stressed.”

Now they have an introduction that has three sentences, it flows, it’s clear, it’s specific, and it has a strong thesis statement. This structure gives your students a repeatable framework for writing solid introductions, and it’s not going to feel overwhelming.

Just like practicing outlining without turning it into full essays can be helpful, the same is true with a strategy like this. You can have your students write GST introductions for a variety of prompts that never get turned into full-blown essays. That targeted practice is going to build their confidence when they do need to write a GST introduction for an actual essay.

Okay, so as we wrap up this episode, there’s one big takeaway I want you to walk away with, and that is the reminder to slow down to speed up. If you’re spending the first few months of school working on sentences and paragraphs, you’re doing a great job and giving your students exactly what they need. If your students don’t write their first essay until January or even February, you are doing it right. You are not behind. Your students are not doomed.

In fact, you’ve probably set them up to be more successful on the state test if you delay essay writing until second semester. Because essay writing isn’t the goal—it’s the outcome of the work you’ve done to build that foundation. When you prioritize sentence writing, paragraph writing, outlining, and revision, you’re creating the conditions that will lead to easier essay writing.

So go into this year feeling confident, knowing that every time you prioritize sentence writing, every time you focus on outlining, every time you give them an opportunity to develop a single paragraph, the closer they’re becoming to strong, capable writers.

I’m excited to hear how your writing instruction goes this next year. Hopefully, you’ve gotten some value out of our little writing series that we’ve done. Now in July, we’re switching gears, and we’re going to be talking a lot about how you can support struggling readers, especially in upper elementary. You know, those students who come to you and still cannot fluently decode grade-level texts—it can be so hard to figure out what to do with those kids. How do we support them?

We’ve got quite a few episodes lined up that will give you some strategies you can put in your teacher toolbox. I’m excited for you to listen to those. Until then, I hope you have a stellar week.