Monthly Archives: September 2023

Here, as your Weekly Text, is the tenth lesson plan in the Styling Sentences Unit, this one on composing a sentence with a prepositional phrase before the subject and verb.

This lesson opens with this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the subject of a sentence. Subject is one of those tricky, polysemous words in English. As you know, the subject of a sentence is the noun or noun phrase that is doing something–which the verb describes–in a sentence. Students, in my experience, struggle with getting beyond the the meaning of the noun subject as a specific category of learning at school, e.g. maths, science, social studies, English language arts. All of this, I suppose, is an indirect plea for educating students in the many, and vital for understanding all sorts of things, uses of the word subject–it works as a noun, adjective, and verb in English. Finally, here is the worksheet with explanatory and mentor texts that constitutes the principal work of this lesson. Please note, once more, that this document contains no supported material such as sentence stems and cloze exercises, although I have some ideas about developing some. For this worksheet, students will work from mentor texts to develop sentences of their own in the form under review.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.