Instructional Planning Guide -- Overall Unit Plan

Instructional Planning Guide -- Overall Unit Plan

Term 4, 2008-2009 School Year
Unit Title: Sentenced! Recognizing and Correcting Crimes Against Grammar!
Grade Level: Seventh Grade

Students: This unit has been prepared for mainstream classes of seventh grade English. The students have been working on writing skills all year, doing various writing assignments in class and on the MYAccess program. We have briefly studied some aspects of sentence structure and variety, including review of parts of speech, but we are still seeing many errors and weaknesses in sentence composition.

Goals

Cognitive:
1) Students will be able to identify and create complete sentences with a subject and a predicate.
2) Students will identify and use phrases, and dependent and independent clauses.
3) Students will identify and begin to correct sentence fragments, run-ons, and comma-splices.
4) Students will know and use several ways to correct sentence fragments, run-ons, and comma-splices.

Social/Affective:
1) Students will work together as partners, small groups, and as a class to learn about sentences.
2) Students will come to understand the importance of creating complete, correct, understandable sentences.

Linguistic:
1) Terms will be clarified for students, including terms for parts of speech and other terms used when discussing sentences.
2) Students will be better able to communicate because they will better understand sentence structures as they write and read (and listen).

Assessment

Cognitive: Participation in class activities, discussions, games.
Quizzes to check understanding. Application of concepts and skills to their own written work.

Social/Affective: Social -- Informal observation and checking of partner and group work to determine effectiveness of partnerships and small groups. Affective -- Are students showing that they care about this work? Informal observation of student engagement, comments, and judgment of quality of work.

Linguistic: Participation in class activities, discussions, games. Application of concepts and skills to their own written work.

Sequence of Tasks

Student Work
Students will complete activities and games, view PowerPoints and fill in notes, participate in class discussions, take quizzes, and complete a final written assessement -- applying what they have learned to a writing a personal essay. (Note: I will not announce the writing assignment as an assessment of what they have learned about sentences, though I will encourage them to use what they know as they write. This way I will be able to see if they are truly incorporating what they learn about sentences into their writing.)

Teacher Work
The teacher will prepares lessons on
Part 1
What makes a complete sentence
What verbs and subjects do
The jobs of verbs and nouns
Recognizing nouns and their replacers

Part 2
Review of previous
Clauses and phrases
Dependent and independent clauses
Complex sentences

Part 3
Review of previous
Why sentences are important
Non-sentences
phrases, fragments, run-ons, comma-splices

Part 4
Review of previous
Ways to reform/correct sentences:
simple sentence, compound sentence, complex sentence

Materials
Video clip from "O, Brother, Where Art Thou?"
TV and VCR Player
Computer, Projector, Teacher-Prepared PowerPoint Presentations
Prepared notes with blanks for PowerPoint Presentations
Black Robe for teacher and gavel
(I was looking for a striped "prison suit" for a student to wear, but they're hard to come by now.)
Prepared and copied quizzes and other worksheets/handouts
Overheads prepared to use with games
Overhead projector