The Paragraph Hamburger

I really don't spend enough time talking about my job on here. Which I guess is good and bad! This week in year 7 and 8 English we have been studying the Paragraph Hamburger.

This is one of those writer's workshop type lessons that I always wish I had done during the first few weeks of school and right now I am making the promise to do that for next year! I am going to do it and do it right from the very beginning!

The paragraph hamburger is such a simple and effective metaphor to get most kids thinking about how they write. It is also a valuable tool to use when a student asks you to read their work. It allows you to have a conversation that is easy to understand (example: "Well, I see that you have made a lettuce burger...let's see if we can add some tomato and meat to make this paragraph a bit tastier").

I tend to start this sequence of lessons off by going right back to the start and asking kids what are paragraphs made up of? Very quickly I get the answer: sentences.

I then break down 3 essential elements of a sentence - Capital letters, punctuation and words (which can obviously broken down further if needed). I then show students an example of a paragraph hamburger graphic organiser (and here is another one) and discuss how this will help their writing improve.

The next step is getting students to understand what they need to do before they write. I take students through the brainstorming phase. Usually I get them to brainstorm between 5 and 12 things they know about a topic. I know 12 seems like a lot and would probably do less for younger grade levels but I tend to find that the first 5 things are what EVERY kid thinks of, so for those who can think out of the box I try to encourage them to go with the more unique ideas they brainstorm later in the process. I often tell kids - if you can't brainstorm 5 things you can't write enough so go find out more information!

We then look at an example of a paragraph (one that is a very obvious example that easily "fits" into the hamburger graphic organiser). I also usually put a title on this paragraph. Often when I ask students what the topic sentence is they will tell me the title which gives me an opportunity to teach them to think of the title as the wrapper of their burger. It gives a little taste of what is to come. We then go through each sentence and identify where it would fit in the graphic organiser.

We then look at another paragraph and rewrite it. At this point I get students to actually draw their own hamburger and write the sentences into it. I find this is a bit more consistent with getting them to see each part is important otherwise they wouldn't have a complete burger. This also gives me an opportunity to go back over writing sentences - I ask students to check their capital letters and their punctuation. I tell them to think of these things as sauce:
1. sauce usually ends up going the whole way through your burger
2. burgers just don't taste right without sauce

The next step is talking about super-sizing your burger or making a "lot" burger. In this phase I get students to go back and see if they can add in something extra (example: "This burger is looking pretty tasty but I like my burger to have extra bacon. Can we add in some bacon!?"). This sometimes gets students to go that one step further to add an extra sentence.

Finally, I will give students a familiar topic or some information to read and let them make their own burgers. After writing I will ask students to make sure they "have sauce" (capitals and punctuation) and also that their burger has a "wrapper" (title). We will then swap burgers and have a taste of each others, maybe get a partner to try to supersize the burger or simply conference to see if they get the concept.

So there we go. A little snapshot of my classroom this week. Sadly no pictures, but I will get some to add into this soon. This is something that I try to do over two weeks or so to ensure students become familiar with the idea and the steps. It is also something valuable to teach to refer back to all year, especially for those students who sometimes struggle to write.