Teacher: Austin Simpson

Date: 26 Apr. 2016

School: Thompson Valley High School

Grade: 10th

Title of Lesson: Parallelism Practice &

Content Area: English Language Arts
Examining the Gettysburg Address
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Content (CDE) Standards addressed by this lesson:
1.2.a.iii
1.2.a.iv
3.3.a
3.3.a.i
Learning Target(s):
By the end of todays lesson
I will be able to identify and fix basic faulty parallel structure.
Todays Warm-Up: Fix the faulty parallelism in the sentence below
When I went to Hawaii last summer I ate great seafood, was snorkeling in the
ocean, and had hiked Kilauea.
Step-by-step minute procedure: (50 min classes, daily):
Warm-up (5 min.)
Parallelism Worksheet I do-we do-you do (20 min.)
Look at the Gettysburg Address by Lincoln and examine it for parallel structure.
o Read aloud (2-3 min.)
o Students write down 2-3 examples of parallelism that they found in the
speech (7 min.)
o Share with a shoulder partner (3 min.)
o Share with the whole class. Discuss: Why is the selection the student
chose parallel or not? (Remainder of class: 10-15 min)
Accommodations:
Lorr Quinn may need to take students who need text read to them into the other
room for additional help.
Assessments:
Parallelism worksheet
Rationale, why this lesson matters to teach:
Parallelism is a major concept in the English language and mastery of it can
dramatically improve sentence fluency. The CDE standards for 10th grade state that
students need to be able to demonstrate command of standard English grammar and

usage when writing and speaking; and first among the grammatical elements that 10th
graders should focus on is parallelism (standards 3.3.a. and 3.3.a.i.).
Not only is parallelism a key focus in the 10th grade ELA standards, but in the
month that I have been at TVHS, it is clear that there is a need for further parallel
structure instruction. Student writing is riddled with verb tense switches and,
predominantly, with lists that are not parallel (e.g. trains and a bus are public
transportation rather than trains and buses are public transportation). Parallelism is an
easy grammatical element to lose track of, especially when trying to construct longer,
more complex sentences.