New and Goods for Capitals and Punctuation

This year we have a group of children in the 2^nd and 3^rd grades that were ready to develop a better awareness of the conventions of writing, including capitals and punctuation.

We decided that we would use the familiar format of New and Goods but with a different focus.

The first session showed what we suspected.  These young children were already aware of many of the conventions.

Their comments in the first session were:

• You use a capital at the front of a sentence.
• You can put punctuation at the end of a sentence so you know it is done!
• You use capitals at the beginning of your name.
• Capitals are bigger than lower case.
• Capitals can be in the middle of a sentence, i.e., the names of months – July
• Punctuation is --. , !?(  It can be in the middle of a sentence.
• When you use a capital –mostly on the first letter of a word—everything else is lower case.

Our goal has become that they begin to use them in their writing, particularly when we have them revisit their work and we are asking them to edit their writing. 

We had several classes where the students gave New and Goods which was written without capitals or punctuation.

Then, as a group, we went back over the writing and pointed out changes that needed to be made and made them.  More recently we have begun a story (without capitals and punctuation and no paragraphs).  We are asking them to edit the story and perhaps give it an ending.   While it is too early to hold them accountable for paragraphs, we do want them to become aware of their function.