Grammar and Editing Lesson Plan: The Quill Game

Lesson Procedure:

1. Play the BrainPOP movie in the Grammar Unit that is related to your target skill.
The movies for Prepositional Phrases, Personal Pronouns, Possessives, Parts of Speech, Subject-Verb Agreement, Tenses, and Clauses tie most closely into Quill game play.
2. Introduce the Quill Game to students. You may want to display the game on your interactive whiteboard and play a round together as a class, modeling how to find and correct the grammar errors in the game.
3. Allow students to explore the game independently or with a partner.
4. Talk with students about the strategies they used during game play. How could they tell if a sentence was correctly written or not? Were there any difficult parts that they second-guessed themselves on? What patterns did they notice during game play--were there any mistakes they found that made it easier for them to spot other mistakes?
5. Tell students that you will provide time for them to explore the game further in additional game play sessions as you teach about various grammar topics throughout the school year.
6. Challenge students to create their own version of the game with a partner! Have students write (or copy) their own stories or paragraphs and intentionally introduce grammatical errors. You may want to specify that there should be a set number of errors, such as 10. Encourage students to recall tricky grammatical rules, perhaps ones you haven't yet taught the class, in order to make the game more difficult.
7. Have students switch papers with their partner and try to find and correct one another's errors. You can set a timer to add an additional challenge: Can you find all 10 errors in __ minutes? If a student finds more than 10 legitimate errors, they can earn bonus points--this will give an extra incentive for students to pay close attention when creating the paragraphs! The partner with the most points when time is up wins the game.