In this short module you will be able to:

Make modifications to lesson plans to ensure students engage explicitly with connections among varied examples and contrasting non-examples

1. Background for Lesson Modification: Appositive Sentences

For the upcoming session, you will be in the shoes of a 6th Grade English teacher leading a literacy lesson with her Special Education inclusion class on crafting appositive sentences during their mythology unit. This lesson is drawn from resources created by The Writing Revolution.

One of the essential preparations any teacher should undertake before a lesson is to do the work students will be asked to do, so that you can anticipate misconceptions or sticking points. In preparation for the lesson:

Read this excerpt from Hochman and Wexler, which describes key ideas from The Writing Revolution, an essential resource on effective writing instruction.
Review this mini anchor chart and Khan Academy video on appositive sentences, the sentence type that is the focus of this lesson.
- Appositive Sentences - Sentence Composing for Elementary School (Don & Jenny Killgallon)
- An Overview of Appositives - Tom Needham (Thoughts About Teaching Blog)

If you’d optionally like to review additional resources on appositive sentences, you can refer to:

Read the text students will be using in this lesson (students already will have spent an entire lesson analyzing the myth). Then, do the work of students in the notecatcher, using the template to craft appositive sentences about each sun in the Aztec creation myth.

2. Lesson Modification Step 1: Determine deep structure (and surface features)

Read the teacher’s draft lesson plan for this lesson.
Read these slides for strategies to determine the deep structure of content
Answer the reflection question

3. Lesson Modification Step 2: Select examples and non-examples

Answer the reflection questions

4. Lesson Modification Step 3: Plan prompts so all students elaborate

Review these slides for prompts to support students in connection and distinguishing examples and non-examples
Answer the reflection questions

5. Putting it together

Review this Revised Lesson Plan
Answer the reflection question

6. Exit Ticket

Exit Ticket