Description
What our Capitalizing Titles lesson plan includes
Lesson Objectives and Overview: Capitalizing Titles teaches students how to capitalize appropriate words in titles properly. Students will learn the capitalization rules for titles, including what words they should and should not capitalize. This lesson is for students in 3rd grade.
Classroom Procedure
Every lesson plan provides you with a classroom procedure page that outlines a step-by-step guide to follow. You do not have to follow the guide exactly. The guide helps you organize the lesson and details when to hand out worksheets. It also lists information in the green box that you might find useful. You will find the lesson objectives, state standards, and number of class sessions the lesson should take to complete in this area. In addition, it describes the supplies you will need as well as what and how you need to prepare beforehand. For this lesson, the only supplies you will need are the handouts. To prepare for this lesson ahead of time, you can pair the students for the activity and copy the handouts.
Options for Lesson
Included with this lesson is an “Options for Lesson” section that lists a number of suggestions for activities to add to the lesson or substitutions for the ones already in the lesson. One of the suggested additions to the activity for this lesson is to have students write a short paragraph to go along with one of the imaginary titles. You can also have students change or alter the titles of popular books that they’ve read. For additional practice, you could have students create titles using a list of words (including articles) that you provide to them. You could also put on a “Capitalization of Titles Bee” where you have students spell the words in a title and tell whether or not the first letter of that word would be capitalized or not. Finally, you could have students create a title for a book that is related to a friend’s life.
Teacher Notes
The teacher notes page includes a paragraph with additional guidelines and things to think about as you begin to plan your lesson. It notes that you may want to teach this lesson at the same time as other lessons related to capitalization and capitalization rules. This page also includes lines that you can use to add your own notes as you’re preparing for this lesson.
CAPITALIZING TITLES LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES
Capitalizing Titles
The Capitalizing Titles lesson plan includes two content pages. The lesson begins by discussing what titles are and where we use them. Books, movies, television shows, songs, and more have titles. You must make sure to properly capitalize them. Some of the words found in titles are more important than others. You need to capitalize important words. Students will learn that they must capitalize the first word of a title, even if it’s not an important word, no matter what! The rules for capitalizing titles apply to all titles, whether they’re for books, movies, video games, magazines, or anything else. Some authors or creators, however, may choose not to follow conventional capitalization rules for artistic or other purposes.
The Rules for Capitalizing Titles
The next section of this lesson covers the various rules for capitalizing titles. The lesson also provides examples of all of these rules. The first rule states that you must capitalize the first and last word, all nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives. Next, the second rule states that you must capitalize articles, conjunctions, and prepositions. The third rule states that you must capitalize the first (and, usually, the second) word of hyphenated compounds and all words of spelled out numbers and simple fractions.
The lesson reiterates that some writers, editors, and other creators will capitalize additional words that would not typically be capitalized. However, students should use the standard rules for capitalization in their writing for school. The lesson also notes that you must follow the rules for capitalizing titles even when the title shows up in the middle of a sentence. The lesson summarizes the main points by stating that you must capitalize the first and last word and many other important words, while you must not capitalize unimportant words like articles, conjunctions, and prepositions!
CAPITALIZING TITLES LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS
The Capitalizing Titles lesson plan includes three worksheets: an activity worksheet, a practice worksheet, and a homework assignment. You can refer to the guide on the classroom procedure page to determine when to hand out each worksheet.
CREATING TITLES ACTIVITY WORKSHEET
Students will work with a partner to complete this activity. First, they will read descriptions of imaginary books, songs, or movies. Next, they will create a title for each of them that is at least three words long. They must make sure to accurately capitalize the titles.
Students may work either alone or in groups for this activity if you’d prefer.
CORRECT CAPITALIZATION PRACTICE WORKSHEET
For the practice worksheet, students will complete two exercises. First, they will read titles and rewrite them with the correct capitalization. Next, they will use a word bank to create five different titles. They must be creative and make sure they capitalize their titles correctly. They can use each word more than once and can add, change, or remove suffixes as needed.
CAPITALIZING TITLES HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT
The homework assignment has students complete three exercises. For the first, they will read statements about capitalizing titles and decide whether the statements are true or false. The second exercise has them circle words from a list that would likely be capitalized in the middle of a title. For the final exercise, they will create real or imaginary titles using the words from the second exercise.
Worksheet Answer Keys
This lesson plan includes answer keys for the practice worksheet and the homework assignment. No answer key is provided for the activity worksheet as students’ answers will vary. If you choose to administer the lesson pages to your students via PDF, you will need to save a new file that omits these pages. Otherwise, you can simply print out the applicable pages and keep these as reference for yourself when grading assignments.
