What it is. The sentences of a paragraph are in an order, and changing it changes the sense.
Why our test works. If any two sentences can swap freely the paragraph has no argument — it is a list. That test is fast, it is decidable, and it exposes the commonest weakness in a Grade 5 paragraph without needing any vocabulary about structure.
Leans on. Lesson 9.
Watch for. Give them a scrambled paragraph. Restoring it teaches more than analyzing a correct one.
Read and use The Chaos of Pequod Street from Paragraph Town, pp.39–40. The worked example is the one you build on the board: Teacher reads the key passage of The Chaos of Pequod Street aloud with the book open and m The class reads Writing Book 5, p.51 — our own page, so a child who was absent can still get the lesson.
You open by saying where this sits — what it follows and what it is part of — in one sentence, and then you give them the reason it matters, in your own words, for about ten seconds. Before anything new, sixty seconds of retrieval on U7 set 1: ask, take the answers from boards rather than hands so you see all thirty, and do not re-teach — note who has lost it and carry on.
Then you do one yourself, building it on the board and leaving it up: Teacher reads the key passage of The Chaos of Pequod Street aloud with the book open and models the move it teaches on one sentence. The board copy is what they look back at when they stall, so it stays there for the whole lesson.
The We-do is the main whiteboard moment of the lesson — short answers, boards up on your signal, every child visible at once. Class applies the move from The Chaos of Pequod Street to two sentences together, checking against the book's own example. If the answer is a whole sentence rather than a word, take it on their notebooks instead, because a sentence written on a whiteboard is written once and destroyed.
They open Writing Book 5 to page 51 and read it with you. Stop at the worked example and let them look at it.
Exit directions in full, standing still, before anyone moves. Then they work alone: In your notebook: apply The Chaos of Pequod Street to three sentences of your own, double-spaced.
You close on the exit direction — Read out one sentence that uses The Chaos of Pequod Street. — taken from every child before anyone stands, and then the line you want them to still have tomorrow: Order is not decoration.
Give them a scrambled paragraph. Restoring it teaches more than analyzing a correct one.