• Choose two age groups from different periods in the physical development process. Give some thought to the age groups you choose, as you will focus on them in later weeks and for the final project.

Question

•	Choose two age groups from different periods in the physical development process. Give some thought to the age groups you choose, as you will focus on them in later weeks and for the final project.

•	Compare what you would expect to see in the classroom from each age group in terms of expected reading and writing development. How might this influence which reading and writing activities you would assign? What could you do to strengthen a student’s reading or writing skills in each developmental stage?

•	Organize the information in a manner that allows for an easy comparison of the two age groups. (There are several organizational options available to you in Microsoft® Word: tables, columns, and formatting of text.)

This is the assignment. My question is what is the best way to go about organizing the information that I have? I wrote it down and now I need to figure out how to organize it. I am comparing ages 6-7 and 9-13.

Writeacher · Answer

Whenever you are writing a comparison/contrast paper (paragraph, essay, research paper), you need to plan it out very carefully on paper first.

Try this:

1. Write all the information about one of your topics on one page.
2. Write all the information about the other topic on another page.
3. Then put them together in this order:

1. Intro
2. All about topic A
~~~2A. detail 1
~~~2B. detail 2
~~~2C. detail 3
~~~2D. detail 4
~~~2E. detail 5
3. All about topic B
~~~3A. detail 1
~~~3B. detail 2
~~~3C. detail 3
~~~3D. detail 4
~~~3E. detail 5
4. Concl.

The number of details for each topic will vary depending on your main points. I would include comparisons (how they are similar) in the introduction and conclusion, but sections 2 and 3 and all those details will be stating and explaining how they are different.

There are two recognized patterns for writing comparison/contrast papers. One is casually referred to as "zig-zag,” but can be very confusing for the reader if you don’t use transitions effectively. The other is topic-by-topic (which is what I've outlined above) and is much easier for the reader to follow.

See http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/comparcontrast.html for further help with comparison/contrast writing.

Once you have organized your information, please re-post if you’d like feedback from someone here.

Mommy3 · Answer

Thank you!