What a wonderful book to stumble across to teach transitions!
When planning for this unit, my primary goal was to demonstrate how transition words can vary depending on how an individual wishes to use them. My hope was that by the end of the lesson, students could use the “transition tickets” to produce a paragraph in either narrative or essay form using four transition words from the groups we discussed in class.
The class I taught this lesson to was preparing to write class biographies. I thought that transitions would assist students with introducing and providing background information on their interviewee, while also connecting their questions to the answers they were provided during the interview process.
I put a lot of work into devising the materials for this less. World Without Fish by Mark Kurlansky helped tremendously. His book is filled to the brim with a variety of transition words that are both direct and easy to identify. I also designed a handout so that students could refer to a prepared list of transition words while composing their biographies.
Elsabeth Hepworth 