Writing on a Train - A Kid-Friendly Format for Writing Sentences, Paragraphs, & Essays

A writing program that uses the same analogy trains for writing that takes students from sentences to paragraphs and simple essays

Writing on a Train is a supplement to your grammar curriculum. The worksheets can be done together as a class integrated into your language classes. If your class moves from simple sentence structure to the four types of sentences, there are worksheets to tie the train idea into understanding declarative, interrogative, exclamatory, and imperative sentences. There also are worksheets to supplement teaching compound subjects, compound predicates, run-ons, and compound sentences. All use the train analogy.

As you move to paragraph structure, you will find activities to do as a class that again link the paragraph to the simple train analogy. Students don t have to learn new writing ideas; they just expand on what they learned about sentences. The same is true if you move into simple essays. There is a helpful Thinking Page worksheet for students to use in planning their essay work.

Included are master sheets of train cars to use for bulletin boards or as name tags for the students. Just having a train car on the desk can help your students remember to make all their writing like a train.

Contents

-Sentence Trains
-Questions
-Exclamations
-Commands
-Combining Sentence Trains
-Trains with the Same Subjects
-Trains with the Same Predicate
-No Boring Sentence Trains
-Paragraph Trains
-Essay and Report Trains
-Train Car Graphics
-Vocabulary to Laminate