Description
What our Capitalizing Dates and Names lesson plan includes
Lesson Objectives and Overview: Capitalizing Dates and Names teaches students how to properly capitalize dates and names. At the end of the lesson, students will be able to correctly capitalize dates, including days of the week, months, and proper names of people. This lesson is for students in 2nd grade and 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 colored and pencils and the handouts. To prepare for this lesson ahead of time, you can gather the colored pencils 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 optional addition to this lesson is to have students list names and dates from their current reading material that have capital letters. You could also have students create a birthday list for their family members that include names and dates (properly capitalized!). During class, you can also have students create a lists of their classmates’ first and last names, birthdates, and favorite day of the week. Finally, you could have students write a paragraph that uses names and dates without capital letters to exchange with another student, who will correct it with capital letters.
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 students may know that you must capitalize the word at the beginning of a sentence but may not know about capitalizing names and dates. This page also includes lines that you can use to add your own notes as you’re preparing for this lesson.
CAPITALIZING DATES AND NAMES LESSON PLAN CONTENT PAGES
Capital Letters for Dates and Names
The Capitalizing Dates and Names lesson plan includes two content pages. The lesson begins by asking students if they’ve ever wondered why some words begin with a lowercase letter and some begin with an uppercase, or capital, letter. We capitalize words that are names and dates. We do this because they are proper nouns, which are specific people or dates.
We don’t capitalize regular nouns that are not specific, like the word girl. However, we do capitalize proper nouns. This includes a specific girl’s name, like Sienna. Students will learn that we also capitalize months and days if they are referring to a specific month or day. We wouldn’t capitalize a word like tomorrow, which refers to a day but is a common noun. The word Tuesday, however, does need to be capitalized because Tuesday is both a specific day of the week and a proper noun.
We use names and dates in many different kinds of writing. Using capital letters in our writing is a great way to show that a name or date is specific and important! It’s imperative to capitalize the right words when you’re writing. The lesson notes that we also capitalize some titles, like Mr., Mrs., President, Dr., and Mayor!
Examples of Capitalized Names and Dates
The second page of the lesson includes examples of capitalized names and dates in writing. For names, it notes that you must capitalize the first letter of a name — whether for a person, their title, or even a pet! The lesson includes an example paragraph on this page, with the first letter of the capitalized names shown in bold.
For dates, the lesson notes that we capitalize both days of the week and months, even when a specific date is not specified. We capitalize them even in the middle of sentences. The lesson includes an example that shows that all of the days of the week, from Sunday to Saturday, are capitalized, along with the months of the year, from January to December. Like the names, the lesson shows the first letter of the capitalized words in bold so they stand out.
CAPITALIZING DATES AND NAMES LESSON PLAN WORKSHEETS
The Capitalizing Dates and Names 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.
ACROSTIC POEM ACTIVITY WORKSHEET
For the activity worksheet, students will write an acrostic poem using the letters in the phrase “CAPITAL LETTERS”. They will write at least five days, names, or months that begin with each letter.
Students may work in pairs or in groups for this activity if you’d prefer.
CAPITAL LETTERS PRACTICE WORKSHEET
The practice worksheet asks students to read 20 sentences and circle any words that should begin with a capital letter. This is a great exercise to test their understanding of the lesson material.
CAPITALIZING DATES AND NAMES HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT
For the homework assignment, students will first use sets of three words in a sentence. For example, one of the sets of words they must use is “tuesday, king henry, january”. Next, they must write in missing days and months from a list of the days of the week and months of the year. Finally, they will write a sentence that include two names, a day, and a month.
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’ acrostic poems 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.
