The critique process teaches students how to give and accept feedback in order to produce their best work. This lesson will guide you and the students through this process using a simple pencil drawing. All’s you need to do is find a simple photo online that students can reproduce easily, but not too easily. The lesson will guide you through the rest. You will be amazed at what students can accomplish after they have learned how to give one another effective feedback. Students also love to look through their drafts and comment on how much better they got with each successive draft.

These 21 task cards help students practice the skill and art of writing paragraphs. Here is the breakdown of the 21 cards: 1- 10 complete the paragraph cards. Students must complete the missing sentence. A multiple choice answer sheet is provided or have students come up with their own sentences for a challenge. 2- 5 cards with scrambled paragraphs from book excerpts. Students must figure out the best order for the paragraph. An answer sheet is provided. 3- Two cards which ask students to read a short paragraph and say if there’s a sentence that goes off topic. They must explain their thinking. Answer sheet is provided. 4- Two cards which ask students to underline the topic sentence, circle a detail, and star the concluding sentence. Answer sheet is provided. 5- Two cards which have students writing their own paragraphs about a topic. An answer sheet is not provided for this. I split the answer sheets into sections as noted above to give you ultimate flexibility. Teacher answer keys are provided, as well as a short paragraph help sheet for student reference. These task cards can be used as “I’m done” work, in guided reading, in literacy stations, as assessment, or as targeted intervention for English language learners. An idea is to have a task card corner in your room and add these to a collection of other cards. They can be laminated and used over and over again.