Content Goal: Identify and write sentences describing three ways that Rosa Parks was a “changemaker” from the story, Rosa (5th grade Wonders text).

Language Goal: Use past tense verbs to write sentences about past events from the story, Rosa.

• Recognizing/ understanding past tense events/ verbs in the story.
• Identifying 3 ways that Rosa was a “changemaker”
• Forming and using the past tense correctly to write about past events.

• Reading level
• Knowledge and understanding of past tense verbs & vocabulary
• Understanding and ability to identify events in the story as actions that led to change
• Ability to write about information from the story in the past tense

• Text annotation of the 3 ways that Rosa was a “changemaker”
• 3 Sentences using the past tense to describe the 3 ways

In a previous lesson, the teacher did a book walk, built background knowledge and guided students in collaborative reading of the story, Rosa. Following that, students worked together to collaborate and share ideas from the story that they thought identified Rosa as a “changemaker”. In this lesson, students will use that information to write 3 sentences.

Teacher explains the lesson objective by saying that after identifying 3 ways that Rosa was a changemaker, the students will write one sentence for each using past tense verbs.

The teacher then guides a class discussion about “past tense” beginning by asking if students know what the “past tense” means and continuing by discussing why they will need to use “past tense” verbs to write about the story Rosa. Once students discuss and share in small groups that they need to use the past tense to write about past events, the teacher does a quick mini-lesson on verb tense and past tense verbs that are used in the story.

The teacher starts by explaining what verb tense is and why it is important in English. Without clear use of verb tenses in English written and spoken information can become confusing. However, this is not true of all languages. There are many languages, like Mandarin, for example, that do not mark time/ tense on the verbs. There are different patterns used to signal when something happened. For this reason, using verb tenses can be challenging for multilingual learners who speak a language that doesn’t use time tenses with verbs. The teacher can provide examples of language used in the class or in the school that do not use tense.

Next, the teacher shows a section of the story, Rosa, that they just read and highlights the past tense verbs in that section. To help simplify the initial lesson, the teacher chooses a paragraph that uses only regular verbs and asks students to see if they notice any patterns that are similar with all of the past tense verbs. The teacher explained that verbs in English tell us both an action and the time when the action happened. For example, the verb “talked” tells us both the meaning of “talk” and that it happened in the past because it ends in “-ed”. The teacher then shows a timeline with past, present, and future and gives examples of the verb and verb form in sentences related to the story using those different times. Finally, the teacher identified several verbs from the story that students might need to use in their sentences and had them practice using the past tense form in sentences about the past. The teacher also identified and taught key irregular verbs, like “said”, “become”, and others that students might need.

Students were then encouraged to use the list of past tense verbs as a word bank while writing their sentences about the story. After the students wrote their sentences, the teacher put them in groups and they read their sentences to each other. As they read, the group scribe wrote the verbs that the student used on a white board and after the student finished reading each sentence, they discussed whether the past tense verb was used correctly.

• Copies of text for student annotation
• Google slides presentation for the mini-lesson