This year we have a group
of children in the 2nd and 3rd 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.
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