8.10.D.v
The Standard
correct capitalization
Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills for English Language Arts and Reading · The student uses the writing process recursively to compose multiple texts that are legible and uses appropriate conventions.
Teacher's field guide
What This Standard Means
What Students Need to Do
- Students find and correct capitalization errors in their own drafts and in short passages. They apply rules for sentence beginnings, proper nouns, titles, quotations, and named places or events.
What Mastery Looks Like
- A student can edit a draft without missing needed capitals or adding unnecessary ones. The student can explain each correction using a clear rule.
Common Misconceptions
- Students often capitalize words because they seem important, or capitalize every word in a title. They may miss capitals in multiword proper nouns, family titles used as names, and direct quotations.
How to Assess It
- Use this exit ticket: “last friday, uncle marco said, ‘we will visit the gulf of mexico in july.’” Students rewrite it correctly and label two rules used.
Lesson moves
Ways to Teach It
Give pairs sentence strips with capitalization errors, then have them replace incorrect lowercase letters with capital letter cards and explain each change.
Ask students to correct and defend the capitalization in three sentences containing a title, a family name, and a direct quotation.
Run a capitalization relay where teams correct one error at a time in a projected paragraph, earning a point for each accurate explanation.
Have students edit a mock school announcement containing errors in club names, dates, event titles, and staff names.
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