Category Archives: Independent Practice

Of all the units on using the parts of speech I’ve built, the fifth, on pronouns, is the longest and most involved of the whole yearlong course of study. As both an undergraduate and a graduate student, I worked in college writing centers. The two most common writing errors that impelled professors to send students to the writing center were pronoun-antecedent agreement errors and subject-verb agreement faults. Consequently, I have taken particular pains in building training around these two writing issues into the worksheets in my pronoun and verb units.

This week’s Text is a complete introductory lesson plan on the personal pronoun. This lesson begins, depending on how you use it, and with which population, with an Everyday Edit worksheet on Pocahontas (and, incidentally, if you like Everyday Edits, the good people at Education World very generously give them away; if you click that hyperlink, it will take you to the page where they keep the answer keys). If the lesson runs into a second day, then here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on satire that should serve well as your second do-now exercise. The center of this lesson is this scaffolded worksheet on using the personal pronouns in all three cases. Students will very likely benefit from using this learning support on pronouns and case. Finally, to help you guide your students through this lesson, here is the teacher’s copy of the worksheet.

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.