"If you give a mouse a cookie, then he's going to ask for a glass of milk." These iconic words from Laura Numeroff's classic tale offer a great example of conditionals, a topic covered in the handout as part of a larger writing series related to citation, style, and sentence level concerns. The line from If You Give a Mouse a Cookie represents an example of a first conditional, but the handout also covers zero, second, and third conditionals.

Concepts

conditional sentences, the conditional, conditional probability, verb tenses

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Additional Tags

english language arts

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Instructional Ideas

• Challenge learners come up with silly scenarios, such as "If you forgot your homework, you would have to jog three miles around the school."
• Mix up different parts of sentences and have scholars try to match them up using the correct time references

Classroom Considerations

• Requires an understanding of basic verb tenses 

Pros

• Uses one consistent example among each type to help make the differences clear

Cons

• Lacks an overview or summary that shows where this skill is likely to appear in writing

Common Core

L.9-10.1.b L.9-10.3.a L.11-12.1.a L.11-12.3.a