This activity is one that I made several years ago to practice end punctuation. I had found an activity on-line that challenged kids to look through a picture book or short story and make a bar graph of the end punctuation they found. The kids and I did this individually and then we combined our graphs into a big class graph. It was great graphing practice and helped them pay attention to how often the different end punctuation marks were used, but it didn't do much for helping them determine when to use each mark. The kids loved revisiting some of the books we'd read that year and having familiar reading material lowered their anxiety about working with an entire book. I decided to take this idea and build on it. I made a quick trip to Dollar Tree and bought colored craft sticks (a different color for each student, I ended up with 6 sets) and clothes pins. On each craft stick I wrote sentences from some of our favorite books but left the end punctuation off. On each clothes pin I put either a period or a question mark. Everything then went into our center: the craft sticks in piles by color and the clothes pins in a big bucket. During their center time the kids would read the sentences and add the appropriate end mark by clipping it to the end of the craft stick. If they got stuck they could always skim back through the books to get an idea of what to do. The practice was great and the kids and I still enjoy using the activity each year.
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AuthorI've been teaching since 2000 and love what I do! Archives
May 2018
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