How to Write an Essay for Primary School: Topics, Structure, Tips, Examples

Ask any primary school student, “What is the most difficult thing at school?” Most likely, they will shrug their shoulders and will not be able to formulate a clear answer.

At the same time, a primary school teacher would answer: “Well, many things actually, which pertain to how to create an essay for primary school: children don’t know how to think about an essay topic, how to start, and how to finish the text, they don’t know how to draw up a plan and don’t understand why it is needed, they can’t formulate coherent thoughts, and build the logic of presentation.”

In our opinion, this is largely due to the fact that primary school children are not explained in due time, even in elementary school, simple things, the basics of how to write an essay for primary school.

How to Write an Essay for Primary School – Acknowledge the Simple Things

1. An essay is a presentation of a certain order of one’s thoughts on a certain topic. Writing an essay in many ways resembles talking with one’s friends: when you need to formulate a clear thought, explain something, tell a story or a joke, etc.
2. Writing an essay for primary school is not a test, but just a special training exercise, with the help of which a person develops their coherent written speech and at the same time learns to write correctly (even with speaking, one needs to practice it regularly, just like in sports or dancing).
3. Writing as a type of speech activity is very closely related to reading: a literate reader who can read and distinguish all levels of information from a text writes better, as he understands these levels of information in texts.
4. Any essay will have readers, and the author needs to convey to them his (or her) thoughts, emotions, and his (her) attitude to what he (or she) is talking about, and to correctly and clearly state all the above. A competent text speaks of the author’s general culture and respect for the reader. In this battle for the result, we, unfortunately, are still losing. But it is the task of adults to help the child learn to speak and write beautifully and correctly in their native language.

How to Write an Essay for Primary School – The To-Do List

The first step is to read carefully and understand (discuss with your parents, friends, and class) the above simple things. Perhaps, you will end up modifying something, adding your own points that will help you write your first essay for primary school.

The second is to clearly articulate what you need to do to learn how to write essays. There are several critical skills:

• Analyze the topic, and highlight keywords in it. There may be a prompt instead of a topic. Prompts are usually made up of several related sentences. There might also be a question in your prompt, which you will have to answer.
• Formulate the main idea (thought) of your essay. In an essay for primary school, students learn to include a thesis statement – a key point that the author has to prove/explain/describe. A thesis statement is always placed in the introductory part and is typically one sentence long.
• Draw up a plan for the future text, based on the type of essay. In learning how to write an essay for primary school, it is enough to understand that before the actual writing, there must be a planning step – either draw a rough sketch of your work on a piece of paper or think it through in your head.
• Write an introduction that matches the topic and includes your main idea (thesis statement).
• Write the main part and conclusion according to the plan. The main part always focuses on explaining or proving your main idea formulated earlier (in the introduction). At the same time, it is not always necessary to plan the conclusion beforehand. In an essay for primary school, a conclusion may consist of a couple of sentences only.
• Check the text, and find and correct errors (in content, format, grammar, spelling, or punctuation). At this stage, it is important to learn how to use online editing and grammar tools – this skill will always be useful in college or university.
• Evaluate the quality of the written text. It helps to take a small break from writing and come back with a fresh mind. If necessary, make changes and reread your final text one final time.

Each of these skills needs to be developed both separately and in combination with others, starting from the middle years in primary school, when students get acquainted with simple and complex sentences, with homogeneous sentence members and punctuation in these constructions. And before that, it is very important to regularly engage in the oral retelling of various texts, writing free dictations and making short presentations, as well as crafting long-forgotten letters and postcards to relatives and friends.

Knowing how to write an essay for primary school is not the main goal: the ability to write correctly can always come in handy after school in writing emails, social media posts, publishing reviews, composing resumes, letters of motivation, etc. And for this, you need to learn what an essay for primary school is, what it is made of, how to formulate each part correctly, and how to express yourself through texts in general.

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