Essay writing in my Social Studies classroom

With the senior exams in week 8 of this term just around the corner, the pressure is on for my seniors to be ready.  The format for their exams is an essay for which the kids will be immersed in learning the context for this however, they still struggle to gage what the structure like in their minds and in the past, we haven't had great success in achieving in our exams because of this.

To breakdown ways to tackle the essay, in our department we are using T.E.X.A.S as our main paragraph writing structure.

Before getting into the context, I spent some time discussing how to structure the essays with the main point being that every essay is an argument.  Below is the power point I developed and I tried to use Marvel characters to make it stand it out.

Slide 16 - 20 are the 5 of the 12 definitions that our W.T.E.(Write that Essay) crew agreed we would share across our curriculum areas in teaching our kids.  I've decided I would print off the powerpoint and put it on the wall, then blow up slides 16 - 20 so that kids could use post it notes to share their different sentences dependant on the context of their lesson.  In my next post, I will share how the lessons went.

(Credits: Marvel images, Write that Essay)