September Loved That Lesson! Punctuation Power

It’s time again for “Loved That Lesson”…and today I thought I’d share a simple lesson I did last week that seemed to make things a little more clear for my students!

If your students are like mine, recognizing where to put periods and other end punctuation is really challenging.  I get a TON of run on sentences in my class…”I love to play football it is my favorite sport.” seems to be one of the trickiest writing problems to fix.  They just don’t seem to “hear” where one idea ends and another starts.  So…I set that as my goal–to help them “hear” where to end a sentence.  Here was the sequence I used.

First of all, I talked about wanting the students to really listen as I did our read aloud–and I really stressed those pausing points, the questions, and the exclamation points.
Then I wrote a simplistic paragraph and left out ALL punctuation.  We worked together to put it in where it belonged.
I then sent my students back to study their own writing and to hunt for places to put in missing punctuation.  I then asked them to highlight some of their “favorite” sentences…sentences that conveyed an idea very clearly or in a descriptive or interesting way.  They had to confirm with a partner that it WAS a full sentence.
I then gave each student a sentence strip to record or “publish” their best sentence.
They traced over it with thin marker to make it pop!
I can’t wait to hang them all up in our “Sentence Museum”–it was a great way to “publish” work in one quick work time and to start to build our understanding of quality writing.  Want to check out more great ideas?  See what other lessons “link up” below!

Meg

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