Personal Essays (Part 2)

I'm back from a little break from blogging! I forced myself to take a much needed break from everything teaching related so I could spend more time with family and check some things off my wedding planning list! I'm happy to say I was productive so now I'm back!

I wanted to share more on my previous Personal Essay post that I started HERE. My students were able to finish publishing these before our winter break started and I'm happy to say that it is still their favorite unit!

So after we organized our thesis statements and reasons onto the blue organizational folders which I explained in the previous post, we took out the evidence we had collected in each folder. We decided which pieces of evidence to keep and which were not needed. We pasted them onto the now open blue folders into an order that made sense. Here is a rough draft…

This is an example of a rough draft that we started editing but of course this isn't the published piece. You can see we turned our boxes and bullets into topic sentences.

We did this for each blue folder and ended up with a long strip which included our intro, three reason paragraphs, and our conclusion.

This made it very easy to revise, edit, and publish our final draft!

Here's an example of a published essay..

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Now that we've completed this unit, the students are very familiar with the structure of a five paragraph essay! This will make starting our response to literature unit when we get back SO much easier!

I have a personal essay rubric posted in my store here for $1.00 if you are interested in this unit! I'd love to hear from you if you've done this or something similar!