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[Coop and Dino singing]

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We know that learning about grammar and sentence structure and paragraphs and all things English… [Teacher pointing to chalkboard]

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can get a little bit boring.

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So we can only imagine your excitement to hear that we're going to be discussing hamburgers today!

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Paragraph Hamburgers! [Teacher holding a dish with a hamburger]

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Okay, that might have been misleading. Sorry if we got your hopes up.

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Imagine we were given a bunch of ingredients, like a bun, a patty, some lettuce, a slice

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of tomato, and a few condiments. [Woman holding board of ingredients]

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If no one ever showed us what a burger looked like or how to make one, we’d have no idea

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what to do, and might end up with some disastrous results.

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The same can be said about writing a paragraph: it's easy to do, but only once we’ve been [Car drives up to fast food window]

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taught how to do it.

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To start with, we need a topic sentence. We can think of this as the top bun, ready to

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hold everything else together.

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The topic sentence is where we state what our paragraph is all about. [Coop teaching about topic sentences]

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It helps to organize our ideas,

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and we always want everything else in the paragraph to be related to this topic sentence.

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So, if we were writing a paragraph about how we think that every house in America should

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be made of chocolate, our topic sentence might look something like this: [Man walks up to chocolate house]

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“Americans should build their houses out of chocolate.”

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Concise and to the point. Not to mention a truly awful idea. But an idea nonetheless. [Man chewing side of a chocolate house]

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After we have our bun assembled, we need to add the patty and condiments.

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Think of these different condiments as our supporting details.

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Remember, all of our supporting details need to refer back to our original topic sentence.

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So our details might look something like this:

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Detail #1: Chocolate is delicious and looks beautiful, too.

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Detail #2: Chocolate can be sculpted into any shape imaginable.

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Detail #3: No one would ever go hungry if every house was made of chocolate.

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Finally comes the bottom bun, which supports everything in the middle. [Bottom bun lands on plate]

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This bottom bun in our paragraph is the concluding sentence.

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This concluding sentence will be sort of similar to our topic sentence, but should aim to summarize [Dino discussing concluding sentences]

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everything we've said in the paragraph in one clearly worded statement.

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In this case, our concluding sentence could look like this:

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“For these reasons, it's a no-brainer that America would be a better place if we used

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chocolate to build our homes.”

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So there you have it: the “burger” method to writing a paragraph.

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Start with a topic sentence that explains your paragraph, follow it up with several [Arrows pointing to ingredients for paragraph and a burger]

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details that support your topic sentence, and then make a concluding statement that

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re-states the topic sentence in a new way.

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But please, we beg you, don’t build yourself a chocolate house.

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On the first day of summer, you’ll thank us. [Man stood outside a melting chocolate house]

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