All About Titles

Explicit Instruction/Teacher modeling

• Distribute the Crafting an Awesome TitleWorksheet.
• Explain that the class is going to practise generating effective titles.
• Review as a class each of the strategies identified.
• Reference the titles of books on your shelf and/or chapters of books and guess what strategy was used.

Guided practise

• Have students work independently, in pairs, or in groups to read each text on the sheet and generate three possible titles using the strategies discussed.
• Share student examples of titles and discuss the ways each performs the work of a title (such as generate interest, predict the content, and flavour of the piece).
• Explain that not only is it important to know how to craft an effective title, it is also necessary to know the proper conventions for titles, including capitalization and punctuation rules.
• Project the Capitalizing and Punctuating Titles and HeadingsWorksheet for the class to see and follow along.
• Go over the conventions guidelines as a class, using the sample titles from classroom texts as examples.

Independent working time

• Distribute the Capitalizing and Punctuating Titles and HeadingsWorksheet.
• Instruct students to complete the practise sections on the sheet independently.