Hi, Ashley here. Hi Mia, thanks for joining us. Today we're going to talk about hamburgers.
I mean, paragraphs. You ready? Let's go.
A paragraph is a group of sentences about one main topic or idea. Maybe you've been
writing some simple paragraphs. Let's look at how paragraphs can make your writing more exciting
by adding more details. You might remember that a great way to think about a paragraph
is to look at the parts of a burger, with the top bun being like a topic sentence,
the filler being a sentence that tells more, and the bottom bun being an ending sentence.
Well, now you can look at the ingredients of the filler to add even more details to your paragraph.
If you think about the filling of a burger, you have pickles, cheese, meat, tomatoes, lettuce.
These individual ingredients make the burger so tasty. Notice that the top and bottom bun
always keep the burger together. You can think of a paragraph in the same way.
In this diagram, you can see that the burger looks tall. That's because the filling, or body of a
paragraph, can have several details. You can do this if you want to make your writing more juicy.
I mean, more interesting. There's always a main topic sentence and an ending sentence,
which can also be called a closing sentence. In the middle or body, you can add
two or three supporting details. That means you can tell two or three more things about the topic.
Sometimes the supporting details of a paragraph give examples, descriptions,
or steps in a process, or even reasons that relate to the main topic.
You can write a paragraph about something that happened to you, like in this paragraph. Last week
I visited the dentist for the first time. Oh, I can tell that the paragraph will be about your
first visit to the dentist. This sentence already caught my attention, and I want to know more about
how your first time went. Let's keep going. I was a little nervous before the appointment,
but the dental hygienist explained everything to me ahead of time.
This is great because I'm getting more details about what happened at your appointment. She
showed me the tools the dentist would use and the chair I'd lie down on. She also explained
what the dentist would check in my mouth. These sentences tell me even more about your visit. By
the time the dentist came into the room, I was calmer, and the checkup went well after all.
This sentence closes up the paragraph well, because it tells me how the appointment ended.
So this first sentence is the topic sentence. These sentences are the supporting details,
and the final sentence is the concluding sentence. Also, remember to indent the first sentence in a
paragraph. You can learn more about that in the video titled Beginning Paragraphs.
Remember that a paragraph is a group of sentences about one main topic, and it has
three main parts. A topic sentence, supporting sentences that tell more about the topic,
and a concluding sentence to close up the paragraph. Now it's your turn to practice
paragraph writing. You can print out the hamburger graphic organizer to help you. Then go over what
you learned with our fun online games and quizzes, and remember to always be clever.