Lesson plan
Fragment or Sentence?
Learning Objectives
Students will be able to distinguish between complete sentences and sentence fragments.
Introduction
(15 minutes)- Begin the lesson by strengthening all students' ability to identify a subject and a predicate through review.
- Display your anchor chart.
- Discuss the definitions of subject and predicate.
- Ask student volunteers to help you create a list of five simple *subjects.
- Write this list on the board.
- Ask student volunteers to help you create a list of five predicates.
- Write your list of predicates directly next to your list of subjects
- Once the list is complete, call on students to come up to the list and draw a line from one of the subjects to a predicate to create a sentence.
- Reinforce the rule that a complete sentence must have a subject and a predicate.
Explicit Instruction/Teacher modeling
(10 minutes)- Write down two complete sentences and two sentence fragments on the board.
- Circle the predicates and underline the nouns as you read each sentence out loud.
- Verbalize how you identify subjects and predicates, and use that as the criteria to determine which of the things you wrote are complete sentences. If a line doesn't have both a subject and predicate, it's a sentence fragment.
Guided Practice
(20 minutes)- Pass out one sticky note to each student.
- Ask students to each write a sentence fragment or a complete sentence on their sticky note.
- When all students have finished writing, ask them to quietly get up and exchange their sticky note with another student.
- On the board, draw two columns: one labeled "Sentence" and the other labeled "Fragment."
- Have students come up one at a time and place their sticky note in the column they think it belongs in.
- After every student has classified their sticky note in a category, read each note out loud.
- Call on student volunteers to state whether the sticky note placement was correct.
- Discuss as a group any misplacement of sticky notes.
Independent working time
(15 minutes)- Ask students to take out a piece of notebook paper.
- Instruct them to each write three complete sentences.
- They should circle the subject and underline the predicate of each sentence.
- Ask the students to write three sentence fragments.
- After each fragment, students should state what part is missing.
Differentiation
- Enrichment: Ask advanced students to write sentences with compound subjects and predicates.
- Support: Work with struggling students in a small intervention group to strengthen their skills. Have these students find subjects and predicates in simple sentences.
Technology Integration
A document camera may be used to model the process of marking sentences.
Assessment
(10 minutes)- Collect and review students' papers.
- Provide feedback on all of the papers, then return them.
- Make a note of any students that are still struggling with the concepts.
Review and closing
(10 minutes)- Provide time for students to read feedback on their papers
- Discuss the papers as a whole group.
- Ask for student volunteers to read their complete sentences.
Related learning resources
Recognize a Fragment When You See One!
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...Ask students to each write a sentence fragment or a complete sentence on their sticky note....
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Complete Sentences vs. Fragments 2
Have your fourth grader test their knowledge of subjects and predicates with these exercises that ask them to identify whether a sentence is a fragment, and what is missing.
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