Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Homophones: Its & It's - Engaging the Students

Today, I had a great time teaching the students how to use the correct "its" and "it's" in their writing! 

This is How it Went
On Monday, I taught my class the difference between the two words by first, using the anchor chart below. 






I then posted sentences with fill-in-the-blanks for "its" & "it's" with my document camera. The students responded to the sentences by holding up the response cards shown below. (I just put the two cards together with a clothespin so they would be easy to take apart and store for next year.)



Today (Wednesday), I broke the students up into pairs. Some of the students played a sorting game for the homophones and some played a board game. Afterwards, they edited their persuasive letters for any "its" or "it's" that needed to be changed. 

The board game and sentence cards! 

The Sort with sentence cards!

SIDE NOTE:I teach writing using the Writers' Workshop model, and I love it! However, there are no specific grammar lessons that are supposed to be taught with that program so I have incorporated it in with the Editing stage of the Writing Process. 

After students played these two games, they went into their Persuasive Letters to find any mistakes with "its" or "it's" in their writing. They know that since this skill was taught, they are now going to be held accountable for the skill when I grade their letters and any other final writing piece they do from here on out. This resource from Lynda made my grammar lessons for this week so much more fun than the way I usually teach them! 

I received this from Lynda at Time 4 Teaching on Teachers Pay Teachers. (You can click here to view this specific teaching resource!) I particularly like it because it includes so many different resources! I have homework for this week, and I plan to give students the fill-in-the-story sheet as an assessment on Friday. It was such a relief to be able to put my energy towards the big project we are doing to culminate our Civil Rights portion of this unit (which I will be sharing with you on Friday) instead of how I was going to get across to students that two "ITS" exist!!!

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