Where Can I Find Middle School Example Essays

[goldenecho]

Hey.   I'm "sort of homeschooling" a 6th grader through a public school program (paper packet based, not distance learning), and we're doing essays.   We've already started a literary essay, and even though they have good pre-writing stuff for it, I realize that a lot of his problem in getting it from the pre-writing to paragraphs is that he's never actually read a literary essay before.    The tricky part is it would help if it was on something he's read.  Maybe something on Holes (read last year)?   Or something on a poem so he can read the poem and the essay in one sitting?


I need something short, maybe something actually written by a junior higher.  

And after thanksgiving we are doing a persuasive essay so I'm going to need examples of that too.

Know anywhere I can find these (preferably free).   Thanks!

Edited November 19, 2020 by goldenecho

[Lori D.]

That's a tough, because at that age, and esp. that *young* middle school age of 6th grade, student writing abilities are all over the place. What I usually see as samples are these amazing, multi-page pieces of writing that many high schoolers would struggle to produce... 😉 

I've taught Lit. & Writing co-op classes to grades 7-12, and the *writing* ability varies WIDELY in grades 7-9 for sure. And that's because *writing* (esp. essays that require building an argument -- like a literary analysis essay) is based on *thinking* -- and the time table for brain development of the logic and abstract thinking skills varies *widely* in students -- anywhere from age 12-15.

My experience is that for the *average* student, it takes all through middle school (and often up through 9th grade) to learn, practice, and develop the skills needed for writing essays of various types, and it requires a *huge* amount of scaffolding and guided questions for leading through analyzing literature, and then another *huge* amount of scaffolding and provided prompts to guide students through the process of how to build an argument.

At the stage of beginning to build arguments and write more formal essays, I would stress *strongly* the *writing process* -- that the student is going to need to work with the piece MULTIPLE times:

- brainstorm/organize (multiple times to get complete thinking in advance,
- rough draft
- revise/revise/revise/revise -- so many "big fix" things to tackle, it takes multiple passes:
* add/remove/combine where saying the same thing/rearrange for better flow
* major grammatical fixes -- run-ons, fragments, sentence structure issues
* style fixes -- word choice, varying sentence lengths and types, etc.
- proof-edit -- "little fixes" -- typos, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, etc. + formatting



All that said, below are some possible examples. Some are models which are clearly adult-written essays to show students all the parts that need to go into the essay. Also, MANY of these are FAR FAR longer than my typical middle schoolers could handle... (Note: Throughout the fall semester, I have my students work on nailing the paragraph structure (types of sentences and order of sentences needed for complete paragraphs), and write a number of 1 paragraph pieces of different types, before we move into 3- and 5-paragraph essays.)

Common Core Literary Analysis Unit -- 7th grade, free pdf, with student sample

Louisiana Believes: Student Work Samples from a prompt -- 6th grade; this shows a range of writing abilities, all writing on the same prompt

Thoughtful Learning: Student Models -- by grade
Note: I looked at the grade 6 persuasive models, and these represent the type of writing I get from my *high school* students, NOT from a 6th grader, or older middle schooler (unless it is an *advanced* middle school writer)

Oakdale Joint Unified School District: by grade, links to a list of further links to specific student samples with rubric scores
- 6th grade writing samples
- 7th grade writing samples
- 8th grade writing samples

Edited November 19, 2020 by Lori D.