How to Teach the Five Sentence Paragraph in Middle & High School
We’ve written frequently about our 5C structure for a five sentence paragraph here at Three Heads. It was, after all, a game changer for us when it came to teaching writing, and we want others to find as much success with it as we did.

The five sentence paragraph is an essential for ELA teachers of all levels, even AP (Surprising, we know. It took us a while to accept it, too). Our students frequently look for the path of least resistance, so even if they’ve have been taught some form of five sentence paragraph in the past, we often find them writing as little as possible, whether they’re completing a study guide in telegraphic syntax that rivals Hemingway’s or crafting an essay full of splinter-sized “paragraphs” more appropriate for a skimmable blog than academic writing.
But the five sentence paragraph sets a bare minimum that will actually require our students to make at least some of their thinking clear, and when we teach them how to structure that five sentence paragraph, we’re giving them the tools to effectively present and defend their ideas in an academic setting.
That five sentence paragraph also serves as the building block for longer essays, providing our students a structure to follow as they write their body paragraphs, whether they’re writing a narrative, an argument, an expository essay, or a literary analysis.
But just because something is an “essential” doesn’t mean we always know the best way to teach it. It’s one thing to know the elements of a 5C paragraph; it’s another thing to get students to know them and use them.
Today, we’re sharing our favorite strategies for introducing our 5C structure for a five sentence paragraph to our middle and high school students.
Strategy #1: Deliver Direct Instruction
We’re all for replacing lectures with engaging activities when we can, but there is a time and place for direct instruction. When students are learning a foundational skill, like the five sentence paragraph structure you’re going to use all year, direct instruction is definitely appropriate.
The first time we do a five sentence paragraph with our students, we guide them through a presentation that directly explains each sentence in the 5C structure.
The 5Cs of a Five Sentence Paragraph
Claim
State the interpretation of the prompt you will be supporting in your response. In other words, all prompts ask at least one question (even if there are no question marks). Your claim answers that question.
Concrete Evidence
Include a directly integrated and cited direct quotation from the text that supports your claim. Be sure to choose evidence that “shows” your claim is appropriate (typically through an example) rather than “tells” (simply restates the claim in the same or slightly different words).
Context
Tell the reader what part of the text your quotation comes from, what it refers to, and/or what happens around it.
Commentary
Explain how the concrete evidence supports your claim.
Connection
Connect the reader to the ideas presented in the paragraph by considering why the information discussed is significant.
Providing this direct instruction ensures that all students are familiar with the terminology we will be using and the expectations for the five sentence paragraph in our particular class. Even if we teach high school and our students should have learned to write a five sentence paragraph by now, it’s worth taking the time to communicate our expectations to students who may have learned a variety of different structures or methods.
Strategy #2: Provide Samples
We like to provide students with a sample the first time we introduce them to a task. Not only does this help clarify what we mean in our definitions for each sentence, but it also communicates our expectations for the quality of those sentences to students.
We generally make it a rule to only provide students with exemplar samples. We want them to see examples of good writing, and we want to set a standard for them to aspire to rather than allowing them to decide which level of writing is “good enough” for them.
We’ve learned, however, that it’s best to provide students with an example that they wouldn’t be able to use in their response. This models what they’re supposed to do but ensures they still have to come up with their own response rather than paraphrasing the example we’ve given them; it also ensures that we don’t “steal” one of their best options for responding.
We do this in a couple different ways. If we want to model how to integrate and punctuate a piece of evidence, we’ll choose a sentence from the text that has nothing to do with the prompt. If we want to model the format alone, we’ll look for a “universal” example that most students will know (e.g., a character analysis of Olaf from Frozen) rather than one from the text we’re asking them to discuss. If we feel like we need to reference the actual text, we’ll use a different section or a character. For example, if we ask students to characterize Macbeth in Act 3, we might provide an example from Act 1 or an example about the witches.
Strategy #3: Provide Additional Prompts
We like to provide our students with the “directions” above for each of the five sentences as a reminder of what to do, but sometimes we’ll also elaborate on them in a couple different ways.
Over the years, we’ve learned that students make common mistakes relating to each of the five sentences, so we’ve developed a few “reminders” that we add to the directions above.
Claim sentence
For the claim sentence, we like to remind students not to make “I” or “my” statements in their response. While there is certainly a time and a place for first-person writing, we want our students not only to adopt a more academic tone but also to realize that phrases like “I think” or “I believe” can weaken their claims. We want them to stand boldly for their response.
Concrete Evidence sentence
For the concrete evidence sentence, we like to remind students how to punctuate and cite their quotations correctly and to select evidence that shows rather than evidence that tells.
Context sentence
For the context sentence, we often restate what we’re looking for in a couple different ways, which tends to help students better understand what we’re going for: “Make it clear for your reader what this quotation is referring to; what are the circumstances surrounding the quotation you have provided? What has happened just before (or what happens just after) this quotation that your reader needs to know about in order to understand why the quotation is relevant?”
Another strategy we’ve found particularly helpful, especially when students are still learning the five sentence paragraph structure for the first time (or we’re reviewing at the beginning of the year), is to tailor our prompts for each sentence to match the actual question students are writing.
Sample 5C Short Answer Response Question from the Odyssey
Loyalty is frequently mentioned as a valued trait through the Odyssey, and we see it in Book 19 with Penelope. Does Odysseus deserve the loyalty Penelope has shown him in the twenty years he has been away? Why or why not?
- Claim Sentence: Begin by making a claim that answers the question directly. This means you must state whether or not Odysseus deserves the loyalty Penelope has shown him and why. [Remember, do not make “I” or “my” statements in your response.]
- Concrete Evidence Sentence: Integrate and cite a quotation that supports your claim (whether or not Odysseus deserves Penelope’s loyalty) using a method of integration that is appropriate for the evidence you selected. Don’t forget, this is verse (poetry), so you need to use a slash mark ( / ) preceded and followed by a space to indicate the end of lines when you quote more than one line. Your citation should include both the book number and the line number, separated by a period. For example, a quotation from Book 2, line 37 would be followed by a citation that looks like this: (2.37). To fully address the question, your quotation must show (not tell) that Odysseus deserves loyalty for the reason you have stated.
- Context Sentence: Make it clear for your reader what this quotation is referring to; what are the circumstances surrounding the quotation you have provided? What has happened just before (or what happens just after) this quotation that your reader needs to know about in order to understand why the quotation is relevant?
- Commentary Sentence: Explain how your quotation demonstrates that Odysseus does or does not deserve loyalty for the reason you identified in your claim.
- Connection Sentence: Conclude your response by explaining what this discussion about loyalty suggests about expectations for a hero in ancient Greek literature.
Providing these more detailed prompts for students helps them to apply the general format to a specific question, recognizing the difference between the different sentence types.
Strategy #4: Use Sentence Starters and Adjective Banks
We’re strong believers in the value of sentence starters for students of all levels. Giving students sentence frames or sentence starters models the language of the discipline for them, teaching them the “moves” writers make in academic writing. It also allows them to focus on the quality of their ideas rather than worrying about “how to start” (a complaint you’ve likely heard all too often).
When you’re teaching the five sentence paragraph to students for the first time, the writing is the key challenge you want them to focus on and that you want to evaluate. They need something to write about, but if the focus is on the writing, you might consider make the “what” a little bit easier. If they’re describing a character, you can give them a bank of adjectives to choose from. If they’re discussing tone, adjectives are helpful again. If they’re supporting a theme, you can give them a theme (or a couple to choose from). You can save evaluating their ability to come up with adjectives or theme statements for another day, when they’ve mastered the basic paragraph format.
Strategy #5: Start with a Fun Topic
As we noted above, when students are learning the 5C structure for the first time, we want the writing to be the hardest thing they’re doing.
So instead of starting with a challenging piece of literature, we liked to use a more accessible topic for our first writing assignment, showing The LEGO Batman Movie and asking students to write a paragraph about how Batman changes over the course of the film.
Students enjoyed the content and, more importantly, they understood it without much help from us, so they were able to focus on the writing task rather than struggling with what to say.
Strategy #6: Practice, Practice, Practice
If you want your students to adopt a structure like our 5C paragraph, we recommend using it all.the.time. Any time our students had to produce text, whether it was a quick write, a short-answer response about their reading, an analytical paragraph, a body paragraph in an essay, they were using the 5C format. We all need practice to learn new things, so give your students plenty of opportunities to internalize those five sentences.
Strategy #7: Give Feedback and Opportunities to Revise
One reason we liked to assign paragraphs far more frequently than we assigned essays is that it made it far more practical for us to provide feedback and allow students to revise their writing. In order to learn, we have to receive feedback about our actions, and the learning is stronger when we actually get to revise something to do it right rather than just trying to do better next time, in a completely different context.
Strategy #8: Focus on One Thing at a Time

If you’re going to be assigning these 5C paragraphs regularly, give your students one thing to focus on each time, and limit your feedback to that one thing. Not only does this make the writing and feedback process more manageable for all of you, but it allows you to provide more detailed and nuanced instruction on one piece at a time.
We always started with claims, focusing on getting students to answer the question in the prompt. Then we’d move to correctly integrating, punctuating, and citing their quotation. Once they had that down, we’d focus on the quality of the evidence they selected. And so on.
Working in this slow-and-steady process allowed us to see more tangible progress from our students, even if the gains were small.
The five sentence paragraph is a staple for our middle and high school students, and we need to make time to teach it rather than assuming they will come to us having mastered the skill already. The more we narrowed our efforts in writing instruction to these basic unit of organization, the stronger our students’ writing became overall, both in structure and in content.
Teach the 5C paragraph to your students using the eight strategies listed above with our mini-lesson on the parts of a paragraph, which comes with a teacher presentation (complete with sample paragraph), student handout, writing prompt, adjective bank, scoring guide, student bookmarks, classroom poster set, and detailed teacher overview. If you try it out, we’d love to hear how it went! You can reach us at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works.