Web-based Language Arts Warm-up Activities



Understanding Common & Proper Nouns

 

Evelyn Smith

 

Ph. D. in English, Texas Christian University (1995)

 

MS in Library Science, University of North Texas (2012)

 

Revised December 15, 2014

 

Having middle school and upper-elementary school students correct a grammatical or punctuation mistake without reviewing the rules involved doesn’t teach or reteach necessary language arts skills. It simply kills time and further alienates disengaged kids. Thus, every warm-up session at the beginning of class should interest students!

 

Below the reader will find the type of sample sentences commonly used in warm-up exercises that begin the first ten minutes of a typical language arts class at the middle school level:

1. We told geraldo that he needed to sign up for Spring softball. 
2. Jack's cousin Kevin lives on 5425 mockingbird lane in dallas, texas.
3. My Aunt wrote a Book.
   

Upper-elementary and middle school students then correct the sentences and turn them in before turning to the main lesson. But do they truly know the rules regarding common and proper nouns and adjectives derived from nouns before trying to apply them?

 

First Students Need to Know the Rules

 

Immediately identifying the capitalization mistakes in these sentences requires that the student know several rules.

• A noun, of course, is the name of a person, place, thing, or idea (mother, home, apple, liberty).

• English grammar further divides nouns into two categories: Common nouns and proper nouns.

By the time students reach middle school, they should know these five capitalization rules:

1. Capitalize the first word in a sentence.
2. Don't capitalize nouns that do not point out a particular person, place, or thing: school, chairperson, hospital, river.  For example, write “Go jump in the lake” but write “Go jump in Lake Michigan”.
3. A or an often comes before a common noun.
4. Capitalize proper nouns that identify a particular person, place, or thing: Aunt Mary, Salt Lake City, the Pacific Ocean, the President of the United States, Senator Cruz, Queen Elizabeth, Baylor Hospital, Cesar Chavez Middle School.
5. Don't capitalize the seasons.
   
   
   Teach Writing & Usage Skills Simultaneously

For example, students can volunteer various ways a mistake might be corrected. Thus, while "My Aunt wrote a Book" contains two capitalization mistakes, the sentence would be capitalized correctly if it the writer changed it to the more specific My Aunt Rose wrote Learning Web Design. Here, the class might learn about specificity and how it adds interest to an essay. Now what does it take to make learning punctuation rules more palpable to middle school students who would rather be doing anything else than correcting sentences?

 

Occasionally, consider using Web-based activities that supplement grammar textbooks as warm-up activities. If only a few computers are available in a classroom, students can work in groups, or the teacher could organize the students into teams and use his or her own computer to present a warm-up activity that requires about ten minutes of small group work.

 

Common-proper nouns. (n. d.). Nounsense. Retrieved from http://www.mcwdn.org/grammar/nounsense.html

 

This page of definitions provides a link to a quiz that provides immediate feedback: http://www.mcwdn.org/grammar/nouncompropquiz/nouncompropquiz.html

 

O’Brien E. (2013).  Proper nouns and common nouns. Grammar Revolution. Retrieved from http://www.english-grammar-revolution.com/proper-nouns.html

 

O’Brien provides easy to understand definitions of common and proper nouns with examples.

Even so, parents and teachers should also be able to refer to grammar and composition guides meant for an adult audience since if a young writer makes a mistake that goes beyond what his or her grade level curriculum currently teaches, that mistake still needs to be corrected.

 

Capitalization. (2008). Dictionary.com. Style guide. Retrieved from http://dictionary.reference.com/writing/styleguide/capitalization.html

 

Dictionary.com simply lists the capitalization rules for standard American English.

 

Lynch, J. (2008). Capitalization. The English Language: A User’s Guide. Andromeda. Rutgers University. Retrieved from http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/writing/c.html#capitalization

 

Lynch adds several more capitalization rules beyond those most middle school students automatically know, although they have certainly come across in print:

• Capitalize the first line of poetry:  "Shall I compare thee to a summers day" (Shakespeare, Sonnet 18);

• Capitalize the major words in a title:  Pride and Prejudice, The Hobbit, The New York Times;

• Capitalize adjectives that derive from proper nouns; for example, American from America, British from Britain, Chinese from China;

• Capitalize most abbreviations and acronyms: P. S., R. I. P., PC, AIDS.

Straus, J. (2012). Capitalization rules. GrammarBook.com. Retrieved from http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/capital.asp

 

Strauss provides a long list of words that are capitalized that should lead to a good brainstorming discussion, based on the idea that in English writers usually capitalize  nouns that refer to specific persons and places, but they don't capitalize general (or common) nouns:

• Brand names: Nabisco, General Motors, Nike

• Company names: St. Jude's Children's Hospital, Bank of America, McDonald's

• Historical eras: the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, the Roaring Twenties

• Holidays: Independence Day, Mother's Day, Christmas

• Building names: the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, the Pentagon

• Countries: United States, Pakistan, Argentina

• Major geographical features: the Grand Canyon, the Amazon, the Alps

• Nicknames: King of the Wild Frontier, Jack the Ripper, the Big Dipper

• Clubs and Organizations: Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, Democrat

• Planets and named stars and constellations: Mars, Regulus, Ursa Major

• Titles that come before names: the Reverend Billy Graham, Dr. Smith, Prime Minister Cameron, Pope Francis, Mr. Jones, Mrs. Ramirez, Ms. Okano

Strauss also provides a list of common nouns that writers never capitalize, including animals (except for breeds named after places or people (example: lower-case dog, but capitalize Yorkshire terrier, King Charles spaniel, and German shepherd), chemical elements (carbon, oxygen, hydrogen), foods and beverages (broccoli, cheese, and orange juice) except when they are named after nationalities or if the user is referring to a specific brand name (Hershey's chocolate, Brussels sprouts, Danish pastry), and unspecified planets, stars, and moons in space: For instance, refer to asteroids, stars, and moons unless referring to a specific celestial objects; for example: Mars has two moons--Phobos and Deimos.

 

Warm-up Lesson Plans on Capitalization

 

Before having students complete the traditional warm-up exercises or in place of doing so, teachers can also involve the class in “non-writing” activities that creatively teach concepts using outside of the box lessons.

 

A fun common and proper noun activity idea. (2012). Hotchalk Lesson Plans. Retrieved from http://lessonplanspage.com/lafuncommonpropernounactivityidea57-htm/?ux=common+and+proper+nouns%7C0%7C

 

Hotchalk asks students to sit “prim and proper” for proper nouns since proper nouns are “tall” (i.e. capitalized) while common nouns are “slouching nouns” that aren’t capitalized.  Another take on this exercise is to have students stand up for a proper noun and sit down for a common noun. 

 

Volmer, A. (2012).  This capitalization lesson for proper nouns and adjectives also features instructional strategies for multiple intelligences. Hotchalk Lesson Plans. Retrieved from

 

http://lessonplanspage.com/lacapitalizationofpropernounsadjectivesformultipleintelligences57-htm/?ux=common+and+proper+nouns%7C0%7C

Volmer provides over a week’s worth of capitalization activities that drive home capitalization rules that might capture the uninvolved student’s attention, including those that show students how the adult world actually uses this information.

Webb, M. (2008). #455. Common nouns and proper nouns. Teachers.Net. Retrieved from http://teachers.net/lessons/posts/4155.html

After reviewing the rules for common and proper nouns, Webb gives several creative ideas for learning common and proper nouns, including a “Battle of the Brains” where teams think of common and proper nouns on specific topics, the creation of common and proper posters cutting pictures from magazines for each category, or else having students randomly draw unpunctuated, lower-case sentence strips and then having individual students tell what needs to be capitalized—or not capitalized—and why.

 

Noun dunk. (n. d.). Common noun/ proper noun/ not a noun. Grammar Practice Park. H-M-School Publishing. Retrieved from http://www.harcourtschool.com/activity/basketball/index_pre.html

Students score by deciding if the word is a common noun, proper noun, or not a noun.

Proper nouns and common nouns. (2009). Online Math Learning. Retrieved from http://www.onlinemathlearning.com/proper-noun.html

Videos accompanying this link help ESL, elementary, and middle school students classify common and proper nouns.

Some Additional Advice

After students complete their warm-up activities, provide immediate feedback, but remember that a middle-school student's attention span isn't that long.

 

When you hand back essays and reports give a shout out to students who use specific nouns to add detail.

 

Also, without mentioning any names, point out capitalization and punctuation mistakes as well as other grammar mistakes that students have made and show how to correct them. Students can also use warm-up time to write out rules correcting the mistakes that they made on their papers. This sounds old-fashioned, but it works.

 

Since most language arts classes have at least some access to a computer lab, once or twice a semester, as a review schedule a day for the students to play computerized grammar games or else watch grammar videos. Teachers, however, shouldn't use computers as "electronic baby sitters" since the students need to be involved actively in learning or reviewing skills, although substitute teachers might appreciate a computer lab day.

 

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