When learning the fine art of essay writing, there comes a time when a student needs to bridge the gap between a simpler middle school paper and a more complex high school essay. This is a challenge all students face, regardless of whether they are learning in a classroom, being tutored or learning in a homeschool.

While making the transition from middle school essay writing to high school essay writing can be difficult, there are many ways teachers and homeschool parents can help young people get through this awkward stage successfully. Let’s look at a few solutions for making essay writing less of a nasty chore and more of an interesting challenge!

Learning to Write an Essay Takes Time and Patience

The first and most important thing teachers and parents can do when teaching essay writing, is focus on patience. Take your time. Breathe! Remember that you know what it’s like to make this challenging leap forward, but your student does not. They are likely feeling scared and overwhelmed, and you will surely witness all sorts of upsetting resistance, subtle and not so subtle. Age-related upheaval and other factors can also contribute to wildly varying results too – not to worry, we’re all human, fallible and inconsistent. But we can also all learn, improve, and find inspiration on occasion. Don’t give up!

In addition to forgetting how it feels to push through to a new stage of ability, it’s also quite common to forget how long learning actually takes. Not how long it takes to ‘get things done’ but how long it takes to actually learn. To reflect, integrate, digest, ponder, try, and finally do. Both time and patience are vital to learning. Be patient and keep the long game in view. At this stage, gentle persistence is key.

How to Help Students who Struggle with Essay Writing

Some students may naturally integrate multiple skills at a time, sort them out somewhere in their head and begin showing progress in no time. Others may need more deliberate work on each individual writing skill related to essay writing.

These slower students are not doomed! In fact, there are countless examples of great writers who found learning ‘the basics’ in middle school and high school really difficult. Newbery Award-winner Avi, author of The Player King and The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, among others, found High School Language Arts so difficult that his parents hired a tutor to help him get through. Practically speaking, if a student is struggling with essay writing, it can help to take a step back and review some of the skills of good writing.

Essay writing basics include mastering the use of fundamental elements of English Grammar such as Adjectival, Adverbial and Noun Clauses, Present Participles and Gerunds, and Past Participles. Reviewing the fundamentals of complex sentences structures can be empowering, as it reminds students of what they already know and gives them the confidence and tools to go forward.

As students approach high school and refine their writing further, they may also benefit from working on more detailed grammar topics like Prepositions (not as simple as you might think) and when to use commonly confused terms like ‘affect’ and ‘effect’ or ‘access’ and ‘reach’. Canadian Winter Homeschool Materials has put together two full workbooks on the latter topic, Maddeningly Muddling Mix-Ups 1 and Maddeningly Muddling Mix-Ups 2. Explanations, exercises, assignments and age-appropriate humor included!

Other writing skills to review include punctuation and verb tenses.

And always remember that the topics you choose to write about are vital to creating the right mood for learning. ‘The right mood’ is an atmosphere that inspires, motivates and nurtures. If students are asked to read or write about upsetting topics, if the focus is always on arguing or proving a point, or if the subject matter is as challenging as the actual writing, students can be discouraged from the actual writing task. It’s a bit like asking a person to sing a beautiful melody with terrible lyrics, the one cancels out the enjoyment of the other. Choosing a topic that students truly enjoy is vital to encouraging them through the transition from middle school to high school essay writing. This might be a good time to be brave and think out of the box!

The Key To Improving Your Essay Writing Skills: Write Every Day

No-one is born knowing how to write, and like any other skill – from knitting to juggling to singing – writing gets better with practise.

The biggest hurdle to writing every day is the idea that it’s going to be a lot of work. A lot of work to get started, to get an idea, and then to do it. Well, it may be a bit of a grind at first, there is no doubt, but if you start small and gradually work up to longer and longer daily writing assignments, students will exercise those writing muscles and reap a whole slough of benefits, not just better essay-writing skills. Start by making sure your daily writing is done with a pencil and paper – no typing. Countless studies emphasize that manual handwriting is better for your brain, so get off on the right foot, as it were, and make this a priority!

As students work their way through middle school, daily writing can take a variety of forms: journals and self-expression are very popular, but are limited to students’ own experiences. It may be more inspiring to take them out of their rut, and focus outward on a tantalizing topic that captures their imaginations. I highly recommend sneaking important concepts in through the ‘back door’ of the mind by presenting students with top-quality writing on all sorts of age-appropriate topics. For example, reading and writing collections like Excellent Excerpts (Grade 8) include a variety of interesting starter-texts and writing assignments that make it easy for teachers to pick and choose what would suit their students best.

In one such assignment, students read about how a Japanese master gardener planned a complete garden just by sitting and imagining it out in his mind, then complete a quick writing assignment along the same lines (what if you plan an entire sentence before you write it, just for fun?).

When working through a novel or short story, be sure to include reading comprehension chapter assignments or other smaller writing exercises. If you use our short story unit study for The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, you’ll find opportunities to write about all kinds of wacky things, including whether it’s really possible to see through a playing card just by mastering your ability to concentrate (spoiler: concentration activities included).

With daily writing, whether it’s answering reading comprehension questions about a Sherlock Holmes mystery, doing some creative writing with a prompt and a bit of structural guidance, or plan old freewriting, students can develop the skills they need one step at a time, without even realizing how much they are accomplishing (until you tell them of course!).

Review and Master the Elements of a Good 5 Paragraph Essay

Last but not least, when helping students make the transition from middle school to high school essay writing, review the elements of a good 5 paragraph essay – over and over, and over again.

Writing is a creative endeavour, and what makes creative activities so good for your brain is the fact that engage multiple parts of your noggin at the same time. Oddly enough, sight-reading piano music is one of the best ways to train your mind to do this: reading the score, moving your fingers, listening to the sounds, and adding emotional depth all at the same time is quite a feat! If your students can manage to study music at any level it will help their writing.

When writing an essay, students also need to think on several levels: keeping their ideas clearly in mind, remembering the essay structure, remembering and using correct language, and more. There is a distinct difference in the creative thinking process and the logical thinking process, and it can be difficult to switch from one to the other, or to use both at once. This may be why some students can also benefit from sports that involve quickly switching from right to left rain activity, like dance or juggling.

Regardless of their extra-curricular activities, all students need to have a firm gasp of the elements of a good essay, and constant reminders of what these are can really help as they begin to try to put them all in place, all at once.

Practise writing beginning and concluding paragraphs, or just body paragraphs

It’s sometimes possible to integrate elements of essay writing by focussing on writing just beginning and concluding paragraphs, or writing just the body paragraphs of an essay. If any of these sections of your student’s essays are consistently below par, you can practise writing just those sections without the time-consuming and tiring effort of repeatedly writing another entire essay.

We put together a collection of essay writing worksheets that is geared toward helping middle school students who need to practise these elements. The topics are widely varied in this collection – everything from cats to Star Trek, tomato sauce, Buddha, and rock climbing! No research is required. Use these worksheets to help students practise writing and identifying topic sentences and paragraphs, and to complete three simple essays.

High school students can make a similar effort by using famous quotes as prompts for writing high quality paragraphs with a ‘compare and contrast’ theme. Check out our resource ‘What Do You Think?’ for prompts and guidance.

Effective Essay Writing in High School

As students master the skills involved in essay writing and enter grades 9 and 10, it’s very likely they will still need to put concerted effort into improving their 5-paragraph essay writing technique before tackling more challenging topics related to government and literature.

Finding Time to Practise Essay Writing

In our homeschool we found that one of the biggest challenges at this stage was finding ways to make essay-writing practise doable in terms of time and effort within the bigger schoolwork schedule. The research and development stage of the process often takes as long as, or longer than writing the essay itself (especially if you’re reading an entire book or one of the plays of Shakespeare). Choosing a personal topic and consistently assigning descriptive essays or narrative essays that require no research leaves out an important element of the process.

Sometimes it can be difficult to see any real improvement if too much time is left in between essay assignments, which can happen if you need to read a longer work to prepare for the next essay assignment. It becomes easy to forget what you’ve been told to change or improve if you don’t have a chance to put writing skills into action regularly.

An Easy Solution for High School Essay Writing

We suggest using shorter, high-quality texts for the basis of high school essay writing assignments as an easy way to get more writing done in less time. Students can still practise their research skills and learn to write in a more formal, academic style. If they use short, challenging pieces of writing as a basis for essay writing assignments, they will nonetheless spend less time on reading and research, which leaves more time for planning and writing, while still producing an argumentative, analytic, comparative or descriptive essay.

Our essay writing lesson plans allow students to firmly establish their writing style before tackling more advanced topics in upper grades. Each assignment will take between one and two weeks to complete (of course, this can vary depending on your particular circumstances and goals), and each resource is based on a simple theme (see below). The level of reading required is higher in some cases than in others, but the content is appropriate for any student, age 12 and up.

Teachers can choose a resource that is suitable for their student’s reading level and be confident that it is also thematically age-appropriate. 

They can verify whether the assignment aligns with their personal or educational philosophy and approach to homeschooling or teaching.

They can choose between different styles of base texts, and also alternate assigning different types of essays. Homeschool teachers may want to learn more about each type of high school essay to make sure you’re covering them all.

Each resource is geared toward writing a five-paragraph essay in standard format, and step-by-step instructions are included. Within this general format, available topics are as follows:

1. ‘Compare and Contrast’ Comparative essays: Survival and Rescue, Space Travel: Two Short Stories, Creation Stories
2. ‘Defend an Opinion’ Argumentative essays: The Site and Antiquities of Athens, Narrow Escapes
3. ‘Research and Reflect’ Analytical essays: Wild Apples, Wit & Humour
4. ‘Summarize and Describe’ Expository essays:  Volcanoes: Mount Vesuvius, Building Iron Bridges, A Winter Walk, India: Timeless Topics

At the Movies titles are another option. Watch a good movie and follow the guidelines to answer challenging questions and do the necessary prep work to write a high quality essay.

Hone Your Essay Writing Skills with Teacher Resources from Canadian Winter Homeschool Materials!

We hope these tips help your students to bridge the often challenging gap between simpler middle school reading and writing tasks, and the greater demands of high school essay writing.

And we hope that students and teachers (or parents!) enjoy our starred-review resources! Whether you find yourselves taking a virtual trip to the Arctic or the Australian bush . . . exploring space/time in an imaginary future . . . enjoying the thoughtful observations of Thoreau as he contemplates winter or wild apples . . . or reading a first-hand account of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, you’ll be introducing your student to solid, academic literature and helping them take the next step toward essay writing success!

If you aren’t sure where to start, you can download our Complete Catalogue for free, or sign up for our monthly newsletter for discounts, free lessons and more.

Finally, to preview or purchase an English Language Arts teacher resource from Canadian Winter Homeschool Materials, just visit our store at Teachers Pay Teachers or Tes. We offer a fresh take on old-fahioned education!