Check out these quick, easy grammar lessons that will clean up and power up your students' writing.
Category: punctuation
Where Do We Go Next? Use a Checklist!
Do your on-demand writing samples go into a folder or do they help you plan your next steps?
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Grammar Lessons: A Time and A Place
Encouraging kids to make decisions about their writing, rather than blindly following grammar rules helps lifts the level of their thinking, and the level of their writing.
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Best First Draft
When students move from their notebook to draft, I encourage them to write their best first draft. (Click here to see other posts I've written about best first drafts.) Something that I'm always curious about is the way conventions come into play during all parts of the writing process. As I've been teaching kids to… Continue reading Best First Draft
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How many exclamation points should one use to end a sentence?
I changed the way I used exclamation points as a result of reading Dan Feigelson's Practical Punctuation: Lessons on Rule Making and Rule Breaking in Elementary Writing. Prior to reading Feigelson's book I was guilty of using multiple exclamation points to express enthusiasm on students' papers and my excitement when crafting e-mails to other adults. Tsk… Continue reading How many exclamation points should one use to end a sentence?
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Punctuating Dialogue
Have you ever noticed how challenging it is for kids to punctuate dialogue correctly? (Let's be honest... there are many adults who have this problem too!) I'm not in favor of utilizing grammar worksheets to teach this to kids since that doesn't get them to really notice how real authors do it. Sure, they can… Continue reading Punctuating Dialogue
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Genre Choice
Going into the last leg of the school year, I'd like to take a minute to encourage you to empower students to chose the genre they are going to write. It is important for students to have the choice of genre throughout the school year. Often Writing Workshops become genre study after genre study. Before… Continue reading Genre Choice
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Mentoring Primary Writers
The past eight days have been exceedingly busy, while also being exceedingly great. First, Ruth was here and we spent a lot of time planning out the final third of our book. Then, I traveled to Philadelphia for the NCTE Annual Convention. On Monday, I was in a new school working with a dynamic group… Continue reading Mentoring Primary Writers
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The Joy of Apostrophes
Is there any joy when teaching apostrophes? Certainly! The only thing is that the joy doesn't come from disseminating worksheets to kids... it comes from using books to demonstrate the concept. A couple of weeks ago I received a review copy of Wiggens Learns His Manners at the Four Seasons Restaurant by Leslie McGuirk and… Continue reading The Joy of Apostrophes
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Commas and Conjunctions
My class is still in the thick of our Conventions Unit of Study. We're nearing the end of our comma study, but have chosen to study how to use commas with conjunctions for an entire day. One of my colleagues was making her chart for the minilesson and found a useful site that explained when… Continue reading Commas and Conjunctions
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Punctuation Police
Today was my first day back to the classroom after being under the weather and out for two-and-a-half-days. I hesitated jumping back in, realizing I had a lot to catch-up on in my kids' lives. However, after a fluid Morning Meeting, I decided to forge ahead with my lesson on PERIODS. (How exotic!) I put… Continue reading Punctuation Police
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Thinking About Punctuation in Texts
My students shared their findings about punctuation marks, from earlier in the week, with each other yesterday. The charts, below, were eye-opening for me since not all of the descriptions about why the authors used them made sense to me. Further, some of the examples didn't quite match-up. Nonetheless, these were from the first two… Continue reading Thinking About Punctuation in Texts
