Dangling and misplaced modifiers are tricky proofreading situations for students to deal with, but luckily, they can be fun to teach as a specific skill so that your kids will be ready to tackle the challenge! Since sentences with these sneaky grammar errors can be pretty funny (by accident, of course!) kids will enjoy searching them out and discovering how the writers said something that wasn’t really what they meant to say at all!

Here is the objective:

• Place phrases and clauses within a sentence, recognizing and correcting misplaced and dangling modifiers. (L7.1c in the Common Core Standards)

Here you can see my note sheet and some practice assignments using a variety of activities. You can find this resource, Dangling and Misplaced Modifiers – Notes and Practice, in my TPT store. It’s a little one – just one page of notes and three practice sheets for this one objective.

The note sheet includes definitions for modifiers, dangling modifiers, and misplaced modifiers, followed by suggestions for what to do about them in various situations.

Students can keep the note sheet in their notebooks and refer to it as needed while they work on the exercises.

The activity sheets start with a chart for students to fill in with definitions and examples, followed by a short exercise in which students write phrases or clauses to modify a highlighted word in a sentence.

Activities on the other two sheets include pictures to write about, a passage to proofread, multiple-choice questions, and sentences to revise.

I’m also working on more of these little specific skill notes and practice sets for other language objectives that might need a little extra focus. I’ll link the ones that I’ve finished so far below.