Maybe it's just my class, but I have found a HUGE pet peeve of mine in almost every one of my students' writings this year: HORRIBLE grammar! We've had trouble with parts of speech, puntuation, spelling and capitalization. Well, NO MORE. I will not put up with this nonsense any longer!
I have instituted a new weekly writing lesson: Grammar Tuesday. On Tuesdays, we don't even open our writers' notebooks. Instead, we learn a new grammar skill in a hands-on way. Then, later in the week I can look at their writing and remind them of the skill we learned - and how they're starting to use them in their sentences!
This week our grammar lesson was all about punctuation and capitalization. We covered subjects and predicates last week, so now that we've got all the parts of a sentence, I decided to get us one step farther and punctuate and capitalize our sentences correctly! We started with this awesome (FREE!) Smartboard lesson from SMART Exchange. My kids LOVE having the opportunity to come up to the Smartboard and click through themselves. In this one, they even got to drag the right punctuation to the right spot!
Then, after we'd reviewed the rules of both, I passed out a copy of my newest freebie... Santa Sentences! (Yes, I am SUPER excited for Christmas.) Grab it free here! They each got a set of red, orange, and yellow stickers. We labeled our red stickers Capitals, our orange stickers Periods, and our yellow ones became Commas. We went through each sentence and added in the capitals and punctuation. There were a looooot of capitals to add- and they caught them all!
Then, the bottom of this freebie is one looooooooooong mixed-up sentence. They had to cut up the words and glue them in order on the back. It was tricky, but we got it! We even added the punctuation in the right spot!
We ended up Grammar Tuesday with some practice from Super Teacher Worksheets. We re-wrote sentences with the right punctuation and capitalization.
Even though it takes up an entire writing lesson per week, I have found that stopping the creative process and concentrating on the nitty-gritty GRAMMAR details really does work! I've seen a huge improvement in their writing skills - and their language scores! :)
Until next time!
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