Anne Frank - paragraph party

Working on biographies? Teach your class a simple structure for organising information within a paragraph. This whole class activity supports both reading and writing skills.

Assessment focus

I can group information into paragraphs
I can organise the sentences in my paragraph into a sensible order

I have used this ‘paragraph party’ approach several times for information texts and persuasive texts, and it really helped children to improve how well their writing was organised. That’s why I have developed a similar approach to use when tackling biographies. Children will learn a simple pattern and later on they can apply to their own writing.

Using lots of constructive talk, children have to work together to organise different sections of Anne Frank’s life. Children need to find the host of the party (the ‘topic sentence’) and throw out any information that is not relevant (the ‘uninvited guest’). Then they explore the subtle way information is ordered. Later on, children explore whole text structure.

Finally, children pick a new subject (Greta Thunberg, Boyan Slat, Marley Dias or Pele) and apply their learning; they have to organise their facts into paragraphs.

Each paragraph follows the same pattern, and children can use this pattern to support any biography writing that follows.