We are working on writing great paragraphs in 3rd grade using various text structures such as descriptive and sequenced texts. Here are some paragraphs I wrote for 3rd graders in Mrs. McKenna's class as I shared a Composing Think Aloud. First I categorized three sentences about slavery from our data set, and then I shared my thinking with students on the Smart Board as I crafted these paragraphs from my sentence category. I hope you will comment on the use of this strategy, and I hope students will share their paragraphs that they wrote after sorting sentences and categorizing them as well.
Captives!
As the American colonies were settled between 1620 and 1783, ships from Africa brought human captives to the colonies to be slaves in the New World. Although the colonists came to this world seeking freedom from strict or unfair rules in England and other countries, such freedom was not meant for the slaves. Held against their will and forced to work hard, slaves helped the colonies to grow quickly and trade valuable goods with other lands. When the United States became a new nation in 1783, half a million people in the country were slaves. Eventually, Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves during his presidency in 1862. After they were freed, the ex-slaves told about their families, the houses they live in, the food they ate, clothing, and the grief of hard work and cruel whippings by slave owners. What a price these humans paid as captives in the land of the free!
