To help your students make their conclusion paragraphs a little more unique, it helps to provide a nuts-and-bolts lesson on conclusion transition words. You’ve probably already worked on general transition phrases as you broke down how to write a strong body paragraph, but conclusion transition words are easy to skip over! Try these tips to get your students ready to find another word for “in conclusion,” and you’ll have given them a useful skill for life.
Brainstorming Conclusion Transition Words
It’s always a good idea to see where your students are at when you start a new topic. Try starting with a brainstorming session to see if your budding writers can come up with conclusion transition words on their own. Get them all down on a piece of chart paper and hang it somewhere everyone will be able to see it when it comes time to write.
Research Conclusion Transition Words
If the brainstorming session was harder than you thought it would be, now’s the time to add some thesaurus work to your lesson plan. Have students work independently — or perhaps with a partner — to look up words related to “conclusion” and craft some more interesting conclusion transition words based on their findings. You can come back together as a whole group to add to your original brainstorming document or to make more polished classroom posters.
Printable Reference of Conclusion Transition Words
It’s also helpful to hand students a reference sheet of common conclusion transition words to make their essay writing easier. After all, you don’t want them to struggle and stress about getting that conclusion started when they should be focusing their energies on the content! You can make your own, or you can grab a quick printable worksheet of conclusion transition words to photocopy for your students to keep in their writing notebooks.
Examples of Conclusion Transition Words
Not sure if you’ve covered all the bases yet? Try adding these concluding phrases and conclusion transition words to your repertoire:
- all in all
- all things considered
- altogether
- finally
- in brief
- in conclusion
- in essence
- in short
- in summary
- in the final analysis
- to conclude
- to sum up
- to summarize
- ultimately
Conclusion Transition Words Sentence Examples
It’s also a good idea to share as many well written conclusions as you can with your students. Make this fun by adding in conclusion transition words to fairy tales, fables and other stories everyone knows:
- In summary, Goldilocks was a very messy and very picky little girl.
- Finally, the tortoise crossed the finish line to prove that “slow and steady” really does win the race.
- All things considered, being locked in a castle with talking dishes and furniture may have been the best thing that ever happened to Belle.
- Ultimately, the only person who can decide if his adventure up the bean stalk was worth it is Jack himself.
- In the final analysis, the third little pig was very generous when he allowed his lazy brothers to hide in his house made of bricks.
In Conclusion…
Once you have worked with your students on conclusion transition words to get them started on their conclusion paragraphs, it’s time to get writing! Pick some conclusion transition words, gather your thoughts and put pencil to paper. Remember, these lessons will help writers of all ages — and even you! — come up with some new ways to end a paper so you don’t sound like a broken record. Now that you know what to do, all that’s left is to write! (Or to get started on grading that stack of papers you collected from the newly minted essay writers in your classroom!)