A Tasty Way to Teach Writing

As a second-grade teacher, I know that it’s important to make writing a concrete process for my students, especially because they will be in 3rd grade before you know it. I found a cute, tasty and understadable way to teach the writing process to my students. The best way to do that is through a graphic organizer shaped like…a hamburger!

To start a writing lesson, I use my hamburger poster  to review what every good paragragh  should have. As we start our paragraph writing, we talk about what we like in a juicy burger.

Now, we’re ready to write some juicy sentences on our hamburger graphic organizer. I have a large hamburger chart on the white board of my classroom, and each component of the burger represents an element of a good paragraph. The top bun is the opening sentence; the lettuce, tomato and meat are the three juicy middle sentences; and the bottom bun is the closing sentence.

First, I get ideas from the students on an opening sentence. Then, once we have some ideas, we talk about how juicy each sentence is. As a class, we decide which idea was the juiciest, and we write it as a class on a the board. We continue this process with the 3 juicy middle sentences, and 1 good juicy closing sentence. Then, once board is full, we read the story out loud together and talk about how juicy or not juicy it is.

Then, we go back and look at our board and make sure that our story/ paragraph has all of the key ingredients for a juicy paragraph. Once we have our sample story, I give each student a piece of paper to get started.

This is the a picture of what I have done on my board.

 Here are some other examples you may use: