Their Eyes Were Watching God: Writing Bundle- How to Slideshow, Excerpts, Poster

Zora Neale Hurston's semi-autobiographical novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, follows the story of Janie Crawford as she searches for love, purpose, and capturing a dream.

Using an excerpt from chapter 1 of the novel, teacher your students how to write a solid analytical body paragraph using an 8-sentence structure.

The Lesson

• Using the slideshow, the teacher will walk students step-by-step on how to best analyze an excerpt and write a strong paragraph response
  • The lesson has 3 main steps: understanding the format, reading and annotating the prompt, building the paragraph
  • When building the paragraph, the slideshow teaches students sentence-by-sentence what to write
  • Everything is color coded with detailed explanations and ends with an exemplar paragraph

What's Included

• 24 slide PowerPoint with the above lesson
• Prompt with 8-sentence template (blank and an exemplar)
• Video recording of the lesson
  • note, this video was recorded for my classes in 2020

Assess your students close reading and analytical body paragraph writing skills using excerpts from the novel.

The Lesson

• 10 excerpts from the novel are included from the following chapters:
  • Chapter 3
  • Chapter 6 (2 different passages)
  • Chapter 7
  • Chapter 8
  • Chapter 9 (2 different passages)
  • Chapter 12
  • Chapter 14
  • Chapter 16

• Each passage uses the same prompt, which is as follows:
  • Write a paragraph analyzing one literary device Zora Neale Hurston displays in this passage to convey a theme.

• The chapter 3 excerpt includes a sentence-by-sentence writing outline for students to practice the 8-sentence analytical body paragraph style.

What's Included

• Documents of the above listed excerpts
• Exemplar for the chapter 3 excerpt

Classroom poster and/or anchor chart to help guide students on what is necessary for a strong body paragraph. Each sentence is coded by color and the chart defines what should be included in each other these sentences.

The 8-sentence format is as follows:

1. Topic Sentence
2. Background information or transition sentence
3. Embedded text evidence sentence
4. Analysis and/or explain sentence
5. Transition sentence
6. Embedded text evidence sentence
7. Analysis and/or explain sentence
8. Closing sentence