Teacher: Austin Simpson

Date: 27 Apr. 2016

School: Thompson Valley High School

Grade: 10th

Title of Lesson: Parallelism Practice (cont.) Content Area: English Language Arts
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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 faulty and proper parallel structure.
I will be able to fix faulty parallel structure
I will be able to identify parallel structure in the real world.
Todays Warm-Up: Is it parallel?1
Do the following sentences have faulty parallel structure or not? If they do, fix the
sentence to make it parallel.
1. The production manager was asked to write his report quickly, accurately, and in
a detailed manner.
2. The teacher said that he was a poor student because he waited until the last
minute to study for the exam, completed his lab problems in a careless manner,
and lacked motivation.
3. The coach told his players that they should get a lot of sleep, that they should not
eat too much, and to do some warm-up exercises before the game.
Step-by-step minute procedure: (99 min classes, weekly block):
Warm-up (5 min.)
Start working through the parallelism exercise packet. (45 min.)
o Small group for exercises 1-3 (30 min.)
o Pairs for exercises 4 & 5 (20 min.)
o Individually for exercises 6 & 7 (20 min.)
Group grade, review, and check-in (15 min.)
Accommodations:
Lorr Quinn may need to take students who need text read to them into the other
room for additional help.
Assessments:
1 Sentences taken from OWL Purdue: Parallel Structure.

Parallelism packet

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.