We don’t often think about paragraph revising as a hands-on activity. It seems pretty straightforward – put the pen to the paper and make the paragraph better. Give it a logical order. Add well-thought-out, detailed sentences. Take out the sentences that are off-topic.
Simple, right?
But it’s not. It can be difficult, whether we were working on our own written paragraphs or practicing those dreaded multiple-choice questions. You know the ones I’m talking about: “Where should so-and-so add this sentence to their paper?” or “Where could so-and-so move this sentence to better support their topic?”
I needed to find a way for students to actually see what it looks like to revise a paragraph. To experience it. So I typed up a few paragraphs, separated the sentences, and printed them out on sentence strips. Then I typed up two “Bonus Sentences” for each paragraph that students would have to add later on and printed them on colored paper to keep them separate.
You could hand-write these as well, but I wanted to be able to give each of my small groups a set to work with, so printing worked better for us. (Here are the sentences I used for this activity all typed up and ready to print out!)
I asked my students to look at the sentences and decide which was most likely the introduction. When I asked how they knew, my favorite answer was: “It’s the only one that makes sense if you read it without reading anything else first.” That wasn’t the exact way I explained introductions to them, but it works!
Then, I asked them to find the conclusion. We had already spent some time talking about conclusions, so they were able to pick it out pretty quickly. Once they had the introduction and conclusion in place, I asked them to arrange the rest of the sentences in a way that made sense.
Once each group had built their paragraph, the revising began. First, I told the students that I had given them one sentence that didn’t support the topic of the paragraph. When each group agreed on which sentence that was, I had them throw it out.
Then, I gave each group the two “Bonus Sentences” that supported the topic of the paragraph in some way. I asked my students to add these details to the paragraph in the best possible place, and what happened next was beautiful.
They dove into those paragraphs! They tried adding those new details in every place imaginable. They rearranged the order they had previously chosen to see if the new details changed how the paragraph should flow. They debated and discussed and defended the order they thought was correct until each group eventually came to the same conclusion.
I asked them:
How did you know this was the best place for this detail?
Is there anywhere else this sentence could have fit within the paragraph?
If so, what made the place you chose a better fit?
This became one of our favorite activities when it came time to revise our paragraphs. If students had a hard time deciding how to organize the details in their paragraphs or where to add new details, we pulled out the sentence strips. Being able to physically move the sentences in their writing around made something click.
And when students got to those dreaded multiple-choice questions, they were able to visualize the paragraphs in a new way.
The best part was: my students learned to enjoy revising.
If you want to try this activity with your class, here are the paragraphs I used with my class all typed up and ready for you here on our TpT store!
Want more practice adding, removing, and moving sentences around? Check out our Paragraph Revising Task Cards!
Need a quick assessment to see how well students can revise a given paragraph? Check out this revising and editing passage!
We’re the Nolans: teachers, parents, and resource creators.
Mr. Nolan graduated in 2007 from Texas A&M and began teaching 5th grade math & science. Mrs. Nolan graduated from Baylor University in 2012 and earned her Master’s degree in English while teaching 4th grade. We’ve combined our collective 20+ years experience teaching upper-elementary to bring you the information and products found here on our website.
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