The Compare and Contrast Paragraph

Now that my students have a reasonable understanding of writing narratives, I turn my attention to nonfiction writing skills. We are required to teach third graders to organize expository paragraphs in the following ways:

1. Main idea, followed by details;
2. Compare and contrast;
3. Cause and effect;
4. Order of events or sequencing.

For the first half of the year my students had plenty of practice writing paragraphs with a main idea and details. Frequently, after reading a story or chapter, my students wrote a summary using this format. This week I guided my students through some paragraph writing using the “compare and contrast” strategy. Our language arts theme currently is Imagination and the reading selections this past week worked perfectly well for this writing lesson.

Goal: 

Students produce two paragraphs showing how to organize their ideas in compare/contrast paragraphs.

Lesson: 

1. Day 1 - read Mike Venezia’s biography of Pablo Picasso with the whole group. In pairs students list the most interesting facts they learned. Have a whole group discussion of what they learned. On a chart write down 8 to 10 facts that students shared.
2. On day 2 read Mike Venezia’s biography of Diego Rivera and repeat the previous days procedures.
3. Day 3 – display both charts with information on the two artists. Give each student a venn diagram template. Working with a partner students complete the diagram to compare and contrast
Picasso and Rivera.

They are now equipped with information. It’s time to write the paragraphs. I explain to the kids that in the first paragraph they will write how the two artists were similar. I ask for a topic sentence. I listen to every idea that is offered and ask them to choose the one they like best. They picked:

Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera were famous 20th century artists.

I then tell them to focus on the part of the venn diagram where the circles intersect to create 3 to 4 sentences for this paragraph.

For the second paragraph I tell the students we are going to describe how these two artists were different. I start by asking them to suggest a topic sentence. Again I allow everyone who has an idea to share, before asking the class to pick the one they like best. For this paragraph the topic sentence the kids came up with was:

Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera became famous because they were unique.

Next, I told them we would “play a game” to finish the paragraph. I would write a sentence about one artist, then they would write a corresponding sentence about the other artist.
I wrote: Pablo Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain in 1881.
They copied this sentence down, then wrote about Rivera’s birth.
I wrote a few more sentences with salient information about one artist and the kids quite easily created their own parallel sentences.

After they wrote their paragraphs, I reminded them to write a concluding sentence for the piece.

To finish off this series of lessons I always like to make time to share their writing. This is important to make the effort students put into the activity meaningful, and also to expose the class to diverse ideas and styles.

The lesson was stress-free and fun, but the kids also learned some valuable writing strategies.