Grade/Content 12th Grade English Language Arts

Area
Lesson Title Grammar and Punctuation Review
State Standards: Common Core State Standards
GLEs/GSEs
National Content CCSS Language Standards 1: Demonstrate command of the conventions
Standards: of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking.
NCTE/IRA
CCSS Language Standards 2. Demonstrate command of the conventions
of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when
writing.

Context of the After students have written their personal narratives, I was asked to
Lesson teach a lesson reviewing basic punctuation and grammar to the seniors
Where does this at Cranston High School East. Students will be given back their personal
lesson fit in the narratives the day following my lesson. They will be asked to revise
curriculum and their narratives using the notes they took during my lesson.
instructional
context? Is it the
opening of a unit
or a series of
lessons?
Opportunities Plans to differentiate instruction:
to Learn I decided, for this lesson, to have students take notes while I lecture about
basic grammar and write on the board. I distributed a graphic organizer
to all students which will guide their notetaking. Additionally, I included
Definition:
Materials, “understanding checkpoints” throughout my lecture which involves
Learners and students coming up to the board to fix sentences and write tense shifts
Environments from present to past tense. These “understanding checkpoints” cater to
the kinesthetic learner, as students are actively moving throughout the
classroom. The graphic organizer and visual representations that I drew
on the whiteboard cater to the visual learner, while the lecture caters to
the auditory learner. Also, by having students work individually to correct
a paragraph, I am catering to the intrapersonal learner.

Accommodations and modifications:

I am teaching this lesson to four sections of the 12th grade
comprehensive ELA class that my cooperating teacher co-teaches with a
special educator. One section of this class includes only six students
who have IEP’s. The other sections include about fifteen to twenty
students who may also have IEP’s, but they do not need quite as much
 assistance. For period 2 (the six-student class) I decided to create a
Nearpod presentation to better review with them this lesson. The
students in this class need to be taught at a slower pace, and need a lot
of instruction. I decided to use Nearpod for this section because
Cranston East does not have projectors. Instead, my cooperating
teacher was able to find six Chromebooks, that the special education
department has, so that I can teach this lesson more appropriately to
these students. For all sections of this class however, I decided to
distribute a graphic organizer detailing which elements of grammar they
will need to take notes on.

Environment factors:
My cooperating teacher has the same classroom for all sections of this
class that she teaches. There are roughly six students in period 2, seven
students in period 4, eleven students in period 7, and twenty students in
period 3. The majority of students come from other countries, and
English is not their first language. The desks are arranged in rows and
are drilled into the ground. The room still has a blackboard; however,
my cooperating teacher has a moveable white board that she uses
instead. This comprehensive ELA class, is a lower level ELA course.
Students who are primarily in this course are those who are struggling.

Materials:
For this lesson, I will need about 50 copies of graphic organizers and 50
copies of the paragraphs that they must edit towards the end of the
lesson. I will use the whiteboard throughout my lecture, and will have
students frequently write on it as well during my “understanding
checkpoints”. For period 2 (the six-student class) I will need six
Chromebooks for each of them, and my IPad for myself. I will also need
six graphic organizers and six paragraphs for this period.

Objectives The student will be able to correct the paragraph for grammar and
punctuation with 100% accuracy.

Opening:
“Can anyone tell me why knowing how to properly use grammar and
punctuation is important?”
Instructional
I am going to open with this question. I am then going to proceed and
Procedures ask who wants to go to college after graduating, and who wants to get a
job. In both situations, it is necessary to know how to write in coherent
sentences, therefore, it is important they pay attention to this lesson.

Engagement:
 I am going to be using the incentive of raffle tickets (that I accredit to
Professor Singer). If my students speak or participate at least three
times during this lesson (and in all my future lessons), I will reward them
with a raffle ticket. At the end of the year, the tickets will be entered
into a contest and whoever’s ticket I pull, for each section of the class,
will get some sort of prize.

I will begin my lesson with the sentence:

i like to cook my friends and my pets

(Yes, the sentence above is supposed to have a lowercase ‘I’, no period,

and no commas.) I will ask for someone to read this sentence aloud.
“Doesn’t this sound like a crazy person wrote it? How do you think we fix
it?” With the sentence, we will review the rules of capitalization; proper
nouns. We will then move on to rules for when to use a period, and then
onto the rules for when to use commas. After fixing the sentence, I will
ask someone to read it aloud now. From then we will work on reviewing
the major rules for when to use a comma, rules for semicolons and other
similar punctuation; and then on to verb tenses.

Closure:
After completing the lecture, “understanding checkpoints”, and revising
the paragraph, I will bring the class back together and have students
share out what they revised in each sentence of the paragraph. Once
the paragraph has been gone over, I will have students answer some
quick questions about what we reviewed today: What is one way we can
use a comma? When do we use a semicolon? Can someone tell me a
sentence that utilizes the past progressive tense?

Students will then receive raffle tickets accordingly (all students will
receive at least one raffle ticket today, but going forward, they will only
receive them after participating three times.) I will close by saying:

“Today we reviewed some rules for basic grammar. Tomorrow, you will
all be receiving your personal narratives that Mrs. Ortega and Ms.
Ruggieri have corrected for you. Your job is to use the notes you have
taken today to revise your narrative. You will then turn it in for a final
grade. Thank you for all of your participation today, I am so proud of
you all.”

Assessment As an informal assessment, after my lesson and “understanding

checkpoints”, I will have students work individually on correcting a
paragraph that I have written for them. They will use the notes they have
taken during the first part of the lesson to help them correct the
 paragraph. I will give students about ten minutes to do this. I will then
have the class come back together and ask for volunteers to read
sentence by sentence of the paragraph. One sentence at a time, I will
have students raise their hands and tell me what they think needed to be
fixed in each sentence.
Reflections Student Work Sample 1 – Approaching Proficiency:
Student Work Sample 2 – Proficient:

Student Work Sample 3 – Exceeds Proficiency:

Lesson Implementation Reflection:

After teaching this lesson, I felt great. I thought it went extremely well,
and the students were very engaged. However, after telling them about
the raffle ticket incentive, even the students who always have their heads
on their desks were participating; asking questions, coming to the board,
and putting in effort. I tried to cater to the students with this lesson.
Instead of using boring sentences like, “I walked to the store.” I used
sentences like, “I listened to a song by 21 Savage.”; “I tweeted about my
weekend.”; and “My friends and I went to the party; I actually had a lot
of fun.” The students loved these sentences, and I could feel that they
respected me so much more by the end of class because I tried to include
interesting sentences that related to them. During the period 2 class that
I used Nearpod with, the students were also extremely engaged. They
had never used any technology like this before, and it was a great
learning experience for us all. I could tell that these six students truly
benefited from the Nearpod approach. They were able to copy down
important information, partake in anonymous polls, and watch
supplementary videos that furthered their understanding. I know that the
students grasped the content of the lesson, because after reviewing the
basic rules for grammar, they were correcting sentences correctly on the
board during the “checks for understanding”. They repeatedly wrote
sentences from present progressive to past progressive correctly, and for
the most part they were able to catch every mistake in the paragraph
(including one mistake that I actually did not intend to be one). If I was
to do this lesson again, I would probably change the assessment. Instead
of having students correct a paragraph, I might try to incorporate a station
rotation. As a first lesson, a station rotation would be a huge jump, and
I’m not sure how I would get around the desks being unmovable.
However, it is something to look into for the next lessons I teach, or if I
teach this lesson again in a different school at another point in time.
Through this lesson I demonstrated the NCTE standard 2.2 and 5.1. I had
to reteach myself the rules and proper uses of grammar and punctuation,
specifically the past and present tenses, in order to effectively teach this
lesson. I also related the content of my lesson to the student’s cultural
backgrounds; specifically, their interests. I also asked the students about
their backgrounds, “You may answer this if you would like to, however
you do not have to raise your hand if it makes you uncomfortable. How
many of you learned another language first, English is not your first
language?” The majority of students raised their hands. I knew this
before I taught this lesson, but I wanted them to understand that they may
be confusing the past and present tense because of this. Many languages
follow different rules for past and present tense changes, and English is a
tricky language. The RIPTS that I demonstrated are, RIPTS 4: Teachers
create instructional opportunities that reflect a respect for the diversity
of learners and an understanding of how students differ in their
approaches to learning. I also demonstrated RIPTS 6: Teachers create a
supportive learning environment that encourages appropriate standards
of behavior, positive social interaction, active engagement in learning,
and self‐motivation. My cooperating teacher said that I gave a great
lesson. She did not have any constructive feedback for me, and said how
she was so surprised that the students in all sections were actively
participating. She also loved Nearpod, and said the students in period 2
really enjoyed that technology. She is excited to see how the students do
on revising their narratives now that they have reviewed basic grammar.
The majority of students, before this lesson, were writing lowercase “I”,
using present tense when it should be past tense, and were misusing
commas completely. This was the reason why I was asked to teach the
lesson to begin with. I am so proud of myself for conquering my first
lesson, and I am so proud of my students for doing so well. I already feel
like they are “my” students, even though I have only been in the
classroom for about a month, and I cannot wait to see what the next few
months will hold.