7.10.D.vii
ELA7th Gradeedit drafts using standard English conventions, including:
The Standard
correct capitalization
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for English Language Arts and Reading · Composition: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking using multiple texts
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students find and correct capitalization errors while editing a draft. They apply capitalization rules to sentences, names, places, dates, languages, titles, and named events.
What Mastery Looks Like
- Students consistently capitalize sentence beginnings, proper nouns, titles, and other required words in their own drafts. They can explain why a word needs a capital letter.
Common Misconceptions
- Students may capitalize words because they seem important, while leaving specific names lowercase. They may also confuse title capitalization with sentence capitalization or miss capitals in languages, regions, and historical events.
How to Assess It
- Give students a five-sentence paragraph containing eight capitalization errors. Ask them to correct each error and explain one correction in a margin note.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give pairs sentence strips with capitalization errors, then have them mark corrections and sort each error by rule.
Ask students to explain how capitalization changes the meaning of “I helped my uncle Jack off a horse.”
Run a capitalization relay where teams correct one error at a time in a projected paragraph.
Have students edit capitalization in a school announcement, restaurant menu, or community event flyer.
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