Lesson 4 Term 1 Week 1

Reminder! CA1 Assignment 1 is on the day of the last EL lesson this week! That means: 2CR and 2LY will be having your assignment on Friday, while 2FG will be having yours on Thursday.

Okay, back to our regular summary...for our fourth lesson, we looked at something new - Paragraphs! We referred to our Focus On Writing textbook, Chapter 2. We discussed how paragraphs are important for organising our ideas. This is especially so for persuasive writing. We talked about how we can find paragraphs in all sorts of texts, such as manuals, newspaper articles, reviews, argumentative essays, brochures and even websites.

Then we read a sample paragraph in our textbook, and discussed what the gist or topic of the paragraph was. We tried writing down the gist or topic of several paragraphs in our textbook, and it wasn't as easy as it may have seemed. Remember, an essay may have a broad topic like 'smoking is bad for you', but a paragraph within the essay needs to be more specific, 'such as 'one reason smoking is bad for you is that it is an expensive habit' or 'smoking causes throat cancer'.

We practiced narrowing down topics such as 'Mexico' and 'Singapore'. Tomorrow, we'll continue looking at paragraphs and how we can develop good paragraphs.

Homework: Read page 14-21 of Focus on Writing and do exercises 2-3 to 2-8. 

Note: at the beginning of the lesson, I briefly summarized Chapter 1 on strategies for Pre-writing. Please read the Chapter if you haven't done so. The most important thing to take away from this chapter is that it is very important to plan before writing. How you plan is a personal choice, whether you prefer listing down your points or drawing a mind map. A few seconds of thought and planning can lay the foundation for a great essay :)