Picturing Possessives

Explicit instruction/Teacher modeling

• Name a variety of phrases that demonstrate singular possessives from around the school. For example, use common objects from around the school like “Mrs. Murphy’s bulletin board” or “Mr. Martin’s door.”
• Create a list of examples on chart paper for students to reference, color-coding the apostrophe in each example.

Guided practice/Interactive modeling

• Divide students into pairs.
• Ask students to identify items around the classroom that can be used to write possessives.
• Give students a few minutes to search the room, write their responses in their journals or on paper, and share with the class.

Independent working time

• Ask students to complete the worksheet Posh Possessives.
• Circulate around the room and assist students in rewriting sentences, as needed.

Enrichment:

• Teach other forms of possessives, beyond singular possessives and challenge students to use these possessives in context.

Support:

• For students who have difficulty placing the apostrophe in the correct location, guide them in practicing identification of correct and incorrect uses of the apostrophe with the worksheet, Plugging in Possessives.

• Invite students to create an electronic collage of singular possessive examples, including a picture and the matching singular possessive text.

• Ask students to complete the worksheet, Possessive Phrases.
• Circulate around the room and check to see that students accurately write singular possessives.

• Using examples from the guided practice, invite students to create a graffiti poster in which they write an example of their singular possessive on a shared class poster.
• Lead a brief class discussion on how students can create singular plurals.