Lesson plan 1 Verb Tenses: Past, Present, Future Fourth Grade

Lesson plan 24


Using Articles: A, An, The

Articles are a simple yet critical part of speech. This lesson helps your fourth graders distinguish the three articles and understand how to use them correctly in sentences.

Learning Objectives

Students will be able to identify articles and use them correctly in a sentence.

Materials and preparation						Key terms
	Class set of Amanda and the Panda					article
	Class set of					a
			Grammar Review: Articles
	Whiteboard		and marker for each student			an
	Document reader					the
	Articles 2 exercise (optional)
Attachments
	Sort the Story: Amanda & the Panda (PDF)
	Grammar Review: Articles (PDF)

Introduction (5 minutes)


Ask students to define a noun (a person, place, object, or idea), and then ask them to define adjectives (words that describe nouns). Give a few examples such as "big (adjective) dog (noun)" and "red (adjective) house (noun)."
Ask students to consider the words a, an, and the. Ask them what part of speech these words belong to, and listen to their responses.
Tell students that these three little words are a type of adjective, called articles or determiners, because they help us describe nouns. They tell us whether we are speaking of a specific noun or a noun in general.


Explicit Instruction/Teacher modeling (5 minutes)


Show students the following sentences on the board:


Give me the blanket.


Give me a blanket.


Ask students to turn to a partner and discuss the difference between the two sentences. Invite students to share their thinking.
Tell students that "the" is a definite article because it refers to a specific noun while "a" and "an" are indefinite articles because they refer to a more general sense of the noun. In the example, the first sentence asks for a specific blanket while the second sentence is requesting any blanket.
Inform students that the indefinite article '"an" is used before words that start with a vowel sound (a, e, i, o, u). Point out that words spelled with a consonant but are pronounced with a vowel sound must use "an" (i.e., an hour late, or an honorable person).
Tell students that nouns beginning in a vowel but pronounced with a consonant sound use the indefinite

article "a" (i.e., a university or a unicorn which both start with a Y sound).


Guided Practice (10 minutes)


Distribute the "Amanda and the Panda" story to each student and project it on a document reader.


Read the first couple of sections of text and demonstrate how you identify the articles by circling them.


For each article you circle, explain to students why the author chose a definite or indefinite article (i.e., in the first sentence, "As soon as they walked in the gate, Amanda and Avery made a beeline for the enclosure where Penelope lived," the author wrote "the gate" because he is refering to a specific gate, and he wrote "a beeline" because the characters made a random beeline instead of a specific beeline route).
Call on students to come up to the document camera to read the next sentences and circle the articles, while also providing an explanation as to why the particular article makes sense in the sentence.