A Handpicked List Of Good Essay Topics For 5th Graders

Although modern education for children in not just about counting, reading and writing, these skills are definitely the basics of it. For many 5th-graders, writing essays is perhaps the hardest part of their school life. Moreover, even some parents say that it’s just a waste of time. However, writing skills are immensely important as children are going to need them for their future education and career. When writing essays, students learn to express their opinion, to explain it, to defend it and to persuade others – in other words, they acquire the abilities many adults use every day without even acknowledging it.

Selecting Appropriate Topics

However, developing the children’s writing skills is not easy for their teachers as well. On the one hand, 5th graders are not in kindergarten, and simple topics about their families, friends and pets are not so interesting for them anymore. On the other hand, they are still too little to dwell on subjects like politics or social problems. Besides, they have to learn to write different kinds of essays: narrative, descriptive, persuasive, cause-and-effect and others and to understand the difference between them. This can be a challenge not many are able to solve.

Following Children’s Interests

Fortunately, a lot of time and nerves can be saved if teachers select some topics their 5-th grade students would really want to write on. At this age, children are usually interested in music, movies, games, superheroes, and eager to share their opinion on what they would do in this or that situation. Therefore, the best choice would be to something like the following:

1. If a were a superhero (narrative)
2. If I were a millionaire (narrative)
3. If I could be a different age (narrative)
4. My personal hero (descriptive)
5. What do I want to be when I grow up and why? (descriptive/narrative)
6. The funniest thing that happened in my life (narrative)
7. We can change the world (persuasive)
8. What would you like to change in our school and why? (Cause-effect)
9. Why rock music is the best (persuasive)
10. The best foods for health (cause-and effect)
11. Why we need/don’t need homework (persuasive)
12. The most exciting day in my life (narrative)

Of course, these are just examples. Most of the abovementioned topics can be changed into whatever is best for this or that group of children. What is important is to make sure the kids are not bored with their essay topics and they really like what they do.