The Common Core Grammar Toolkit

Using Mentor Texts to Teach the Language Standards in Grades 6-8

Sean Ruday

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415739771, 9780415739764
• eBook ISBN: 9781317810490
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Common Core's language standards can seem overwhelming—students need to learn specific, complex grammar rules at each grade level. The Common Core Grammar Toolkit to the rescue! This comprehensive guide makes grammar instruction fun and meaningful.

You will learn how to…

•Teach the Common Core's language standards for grades 6–8 by presenting each grammar rule as a useful writing tool.
•Use mentor texts—excerpts from great literature—to help students understand grammar in action.
•Promote metacognition along the way, so that students become responsible for their own learning.

The book thoroughly covers how to teach the Common Core's language standards for grades 6-8, on topics such as understanding intensive pronouns, using commas to set off nonrestrictive clauses, maintaining consistency in style and tone, forming verbs in different moods, and much, much more. You'll learn how to present each of these grammar rules to your students as tools that will help them improve their writing. You'll also find classroom snapshots that show the tools in action, and handy, reproducible charts that you can use with your own students.

Bonus! The book includes a free annotated bibliography, which is offered as a Supplemental Download on our website. The bibliography lists high-quality young adult literature and gives examples of key grammatical concepts found in each work, so you can use additional mentor texts with your students.

Section 1

Grammatical Concepts Aligned with Grade Six Common Core Language Standards

1 Understanding the Impact of Intensive Pronouns

What are Intensive Pronouns?

Common Core Language Standard 6.1 calls for students to “use intensive pronouns (e.g. myself, ourselves)” as part of a more general statement that students must “demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking” (Common Core State Standards, 2010). Intensive pronouns are words used to provide extra emphasis to a sentence by emphasizing a previously used noun or pronoun (Kolln & Funk, 2012). For example, in the sentence “The principal himself visited our class for lunch,” “himself” is an example of an intensive pronoun. Note that the word “himself” is not needed for this sentence to make sense; the sentence “The principal visited our class for lunch” is perfectly fine grammatically. However, the intensive pronoun “himself” is still important to this sentence; it emphasizes that the principal was the one that visited our class and makes the impact of his visit apparent to the reader. In the sentence “I like pizza myself,” the intensive pronoun “myself” emphasizes the fact that the speaker likes pizza. It indicates that while others may prefer different foods, he or she enjoys pizza.

There are specific pronouns that can function as intensive pronouns in sentences; each of these is listed in Figure 1.1. In this figure, these pronouns are organized by person (first, second, or third) and number (singular or plural).

An important issue to note about intensive pronouns is that the words listed in Figure 1.1 do not always function as intensive pronouns. In other words, you might see one of these words in a sentence in which it functions as a different kind of pronoun. This is because the words that function as intensive pronouns can function as reflexive pronouns instead (depending on how they are used in a sentence). This is important to note because although this element of Common Core Language Standard 6.1 focuses specifically on intensive pronouns, a key aspect of understanding intensive pronouns is being able to differentiate them from reflexive pronouns. In the sentence “John saw himself in the mirror,” “himself” is not used for emphasis, but rather to let readers know who John saw, making it a reflexive pronoun.

Person	Singular	Plural
First	Myself	Ourselves
Second	Yourself	Yourselves
Third	Himself/herself/itself	Themselves

Figure 1.1 Intensive Pronouns

When I talk with students about identifying whether pronouns are reflexive or intensive, I encourage them to ask, “Does the sentence make sense without this pronoun?” If they answer “Yes,” then they are identifying the pronoun as intensive, as that pronoun is used for extra emphasis but is not needed for the sentence to be grammatically correct. If they answer “No,” then the pronoun must be reflexive because it notifies readers of key information that is needed for the sentence to be grammatically correct. For example, the sentence “Mr. Smith himself cooked dinner” contains an intensive pronoun; “himself” adds emphasis to the sentence but is not necessary. However, the sentence “Mr. Smith cooked dinner for his wife and himself” contains a reflexive pronoun; the sentence would not make sense if we eliminated the word “himself” from it.

Why Intensive Pronouns are Important to Good Writing

Intensive pronouns are important tools for writers to have in their grammar toolkits. There are numerous situations in which writers might want to add an extra level of emphasis to a particular statement. For example, take the following passage from Lois Lowry’s (1993) novel The Giver, in which a young girl named Lily insists that her mother let her tie her own hair ribbons: “Lily, standing in front of her, fidgeted impatiently. ‘I can tie them myself,’ she complained. ‘I always have’” (p. 40). In this excerpt, “myself” is an example of an intensive pronoun; Lily uses it to emphasize her statement that she does not need any help tying her shoes. Note how the use of this intensive pronoun changes the tone of the statement: without it, the sentence would read: “I can tie them.” That sentence makes sense grammatically, but does not contain the same kind of tone that “I can tie them myself” does. If Lois Lowry created this sentence without an intensive pronoun, Lily’s statement would not have the amount of emphasis it currently does.

Intensive pronouns are important to both fiction and nonfiction writing. In Farley Mowat’s (1963) book Never Cry Wolf, a nonfiction piece of nature writing, the author uses an intensive pronoun to add emphasis to a statement about his quest to find and study wolves in subarctic regions. Mowat concludes the first chapter of this book with the following statement, in which he describes his travel plans and his goal of locating hard-to-find wolves: “My immediate destination was Churchill, on the western shore of Hudson Bay; but beyond that, somewhere in the desolate wastes of the subarctic Barren Lands, lay my ultimate objective—the wolf himself” (p. 16). This sentence ends with the intensive pronoun “himself,” which emphasizes the wolf to which Mowat refers. Let us look at the ending of this sentence again, this time without the intensive pronoun: “… somewhere in the desolate wastes of the subarctic Barren Lands, lay my ultimate objective—the wolf.” Examining this revised sentence, we can sense the differing amount of emphasis placed on the wolf. While it still refers to the wolf as Mowat’s ultimate objective, this version does not signal the wolf’s importance in the same way the original one does. The intensive pronoun “himself” in Mowat’s original version allows for readers to firmly grasp the importance the author places on locating the wolves he has set out to find.

So, why are intensive pronouns important to effective writing? As Lowry and Mowat’s examples illustrate, these pronouns provide additional levels of emphasis to statements that call for it. While many statements do not require the emphatic effect of intensive pronouns, those that do can certainly be enhanced by this significant grammatical concept. The examples from The Giver and Never Cry Wolf described in this section utilize intensive pronouns to make sure specific statements create their desired effects.

A Classroom Snapshot
As 28 boisterous sixth graders enter their English classroom and find their seats, I greet them and direct them to a single word written on the whiteboard: “Intense.” “Please take one minute,” I explain, “and write whatever comes to your mind when you read the word ‘intense.’”

The students quickly do as instructed and I walk around the room as they write. After two minutes have passed, I ask for any volunteers who would like to share one of their ideas with the class. A boy in the front of the room raises his hand and says, “Mr. T.” The class laughs and I write “Mr. T” on the whiteboard near the word “Intense.”

“What else?” I ask.

Student hands around the room go up; I call on a female student who says, “One of the words I wrote is the word ‘powerful.’”

I write “Powerful” on the whiteboard and then call on another student who offers, “One thing I put down is ‘strong.’ If you have an intense feeling, you have a strong feeling.”

“Very good explanation,” I reply, writing “Strong” on the board. “This is a really good start,” I continue. “Powerful and strong are certainly good synonyms for intense and Mr. T is definitely an intense individual.” The students chuckle again about the mention of Mr. T before I transition to the day’s activity by stating, “You’ve been learning about pronouns, but today we’re going to talk about a new kind—intensive pronouns. Intensive pronouns are used to add emphasis to a piece of writing, which can, in a way, increase a statement’s power and strength.”

I direct the students to an easel pad in the front of the room. On a piece of paper on this easel pad, I have written the list of intensive pronouns found in Figure 1.1. “These are the intensive pronouns,” I state. I explain to the students how they are organized by person and number like other pronouns they have studied. Once I have talked with the students about these fundamental elements of intensive pronouns, I transition to a discussion of how these pronouns are used in writing. “I call the intensive pronouns the ‘emphasis pronouns’ because they give additional emphasis to a statement. Let me show you an example.” I turn the easel pad to a new sheet of paper, which contains the following sentence: “I finished cleaning the house myself.” “This is an example of a sentence with an intensive pronoun,” I explain. “Can anyone find it?”

Student hands go up around the room. I call on a young man who correctly identifies the intensive pronoun as “myself.” “That’s great,” I respond. “This sentence uses the intensive pronoun ‘myself’ for extra emphasis. If we take the word ‘myself’ away, this sentence would say ‘I finished cleaning the house.’ That makes sense, but it doesn’t have the emphasis that the original version does. Someone might say ‘I finished cleaning the house myself’ to emphasize that he or she did it without anyone helping. When we use intensive pronouns like ‘myself,’ we can make statements stronger or more powerful by putting additional emphasis on them.”

After this, I inform the students that I am going to show them an example of an intensive pronoun from the book they are currently reading as a class—The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi (1990). “This example I’ll show you is from the part of the book where Charlotte is talking about washing her own clothes for the first time.” I turn the easel pad to a piece of a paper that reads, “If I wanted to wash things—and I did try—I had to do it myself” (p. 67). I ask for any volunteers to identify the intensive pronoun in this sentence.

I quickly survey the raised hands and call on a student who says, “The intensive pronoun is ‘myself.’”

“Great,” I say. “Now, why do you think Avi, the author of this book, had Charlotte use an intensive pronoun in her narration here?”

“It gives more attention to her being the one to do it,” explains a quick-to-reply student.

“That’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Meet the Author
• Free Downloads
• Introduction: “Grammar Tools”: Helping Middle School Students Understand the Importance and Uses of Grammar
• Section 1: Grammatical Concepts Aligned with Grade Six Common Core Language Standards
• Section 2: Grammatical Concepts Aligned with Grade Seven Common Core Language Standards
• Section 3: Grammatical Concepts Aligned with Grade Eight Common Core Language Standards
• Section 4: Putting it Together
• Conclusion: Final Thoughts and Tips for Classroom Practice
• References
• Appendix: Reproducible Charts and Forms You Can Use in Your Classroom