I have had this idea swirling in my head since the beginning of the year that I was going to turn my classroom in to a crime scene where students have to be “punctuation police”. Kim Bearden does grammar police at RCA and when I went back last week, I just knew that I was going to want to do it this week. If I’m being totally honest with you, I wasn’t sure how to take a middle school teacher’s (and not just any middle school teacher…THE middle school teacher) idea and make it work for a Kindergarten classroom. It must be the spirit of the crime scene today and being surrounded by little police officers that I’ll tell you this…I didn’t even have this all put together until last night.
After talking to my husband and other teachers some, I was able to piece it together in a way that I feel was really meaningful and engaging for my kids. I’m also pretty certain that they will never forget a punctuation mark for the rest of their school days (which is a slight exaggeration but I’m just telling myself that).
First, you have to set up your room like a crime scene! Kids will be more excited and buy in to what you are wanting them to do if you make it exciting! I was playing “Bad Boys” as they walked in to the classroom.
I tried to cover as much as I could with caution tape. The kind I found was from Amazon. I just wore jeans and a navy shirt. I found my hat, handcuffs and badge at Party City. I had the kids use the smaller clip-boards for their ticket writing. I found these mini-clipboards from an on-line office supply store. They were pretty inexpensive.
I asked students to wear either a black or navy shirt to school because they had to look the part! The kids came in and colored the police hats and cut them out. I put the hat cut-out on a sentence strip and printed off the labels on Avery shipping labels (5163). There is no need to purchase things for your kids to wear! You can make this as easy as possible 🙂 I had some kids that knew we were going to be doing something police related and they came to school decked out in a full police costume.
More power to ya.
After they cut out there hats, it was time to get busy.
My neighbor art teacher (bless her) came over and snapped a few pictures of us in action.
Here is how the activity went….
Around the room were circular baskets with sentences that had incorrect punctuation. I had a total of five baskets. There are over 100 sentences so you could probably make this activity last all day if you wanted to!
I had “punctuation citations” for the boy officers and girl officers. I put the girl tickets in a pink basket, and the boy tickets in a blue basket.
Some of the kids were “offenders” some “officers” and I had three kids act as the judges. This will look differently in each classroom. You can have kids draw numbers or just assign them their part. The student that was the “offender” had to go get a sentence out of one of the circular baskets. A punctuation officer would come over with their clip-board and ticket in hand. The two students read the sentence together and the punctuation police then writes a ticket for the punctuation mark that was misused.
Once students had written the ticket. They brought the ticket to the judges and had to try to “get out of jail” by re-writing the sentence. The offender and the officer had to work together to come up with the correct punctuation.
After the sentence was re-written, they had to present it to the “judge”. The judge, officer and offender would then discuss the sentence. If the judge deemed the sentence was still wrong, they would send the “offender” to the slammer (i.e. my library) for 13 seconds. No reason for 13 seconds…just a funny random amount of time will suffice :). Make sure to mix students up so they can play each part. At the “judge” table is where I kept the get out of jail free cards.
I had the judges wear the same capes that we use for vowel bat #twobirdsonestone.
The judges were busy…there were a lot of punctuation offenders in our room.
I moved the judges table to the front of the room because I knew there would be a lot of action up there, and there was….
This activity was so powerful because it got kids talking about what they were changing and why they were changing their punctuation. There was a sentence that read, “I love my friends?” and one of the little boys said, “I’m going to put a period at the end of that sentence.” His partner that was playing the punctuation officer looked at him and replied, “You must not really like your friends too much.”
Not only was that a hilarious thing to say, but it was so meaningful and authentic. They were engaged and not once did I have to redirect because of behavior. Yes, they had to be prompted and asked about their answers. However, they were so wrapped up in the task that they (shhh…don’t tell them) were learning.
It didn’t stop in the classroom. I hid these “punctuation punks” up around the school building. As we walked to recess, lunch…etc, they had to find the “punks” and write them tickets.
After we found all of the punctuation punks, we came back to the classroom and had a whole group discussion about what punctuation mark should be at the end of the sentences. We helped them get out of jail too…
This would be great as a wrap up or introduction to this activity.
Happy patrolling!
So cute! What a great idea, love it!!
This is amazing! I need to whip my kids into shape and this will definitely help! Thanks so much for sharing.
I just LOVE this! I found your blog later into the beginning of the school year and am so inspired by these things that you are doing. Getting on this right away – wishing I could do it tomorrow! Keep it coming, girl! You have been such a great source of inspiration and reignited that spark for this wonderful teaching thing! (Also – tell me more about your capes!)
Absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVE this idea!! What a great activity…my firsties would be all over this! We just started editing and grammar so I am definitely going to bookmark this idea!
Ahhhh this is just BRILLIANT and SO MUCH FUN! You are such an awesome teacher! I would want to be in your class! 🙂
I need this for capitalization/ misusing capital letters! Could you modify it for that?
Love, love, love this idea! I am totally doing this during our community helpers unit. I always have my hubby come in and talk with the kids (he is a police officer) so I think they would have fun doing this in conjunction with that. Thanks for always inspiring me. <3
What an awesome idea! I thought about that after the fact :-p
Oh, somebody’s going to the slammer! “Once students had written a ticket. They brought the ticket…” Hehehe. I’ll bet you did that on purpose, didn’t you? Seriously, what an awesome, meaningful activity this was for your students! Thanks for sharing!
Thank you, Susan!
Girl! You rocked this!! You did an awesome job taking Kim’s inspiration and making it come to life “kindergarten style!” 🙂 You’re the best!
Thanks girl…you know I think of you the same way <3 Love ya!
Hi! thank you so much for sharing! I love this idea and want to do this in my class. I was just wondering I have some kids that are not yet reading so what do you think of the modification of adding pictures to the sentences to help those readers. Thank you for sharing!
I think adding pictures is a great idea!
Such a cute idea- This would be a good way to show my kids that the police are not always bad LOL. Thanks for sharing.
✿Tiffani Time 4 Kindergarten
Lol…that thought did cross my mind! You would love it and so would your kids!
Very cute idea! Hard to believe that this was done in a kindergarten class. My students could not do this. They get out of control with anything fun and I have some who have a hard time reading and would struggle with reading the sentences. How did your strugglers do with it?
To be really honest, my students know what my expectations are. They don’t have the opportunity to be out of control one single second of the day except for recess. We talk about behavior constantly and I am very clear with them. They know right from wrong by this point. In terms of academically struggling, I group students on ability. I try to spread out my leaders and students that I know are high. Those are the students that I teach to 🙂 You teach to the high babies and the other ones rise up. It’s what I’ve always done 🙂
I’ve always believed that, too, that we teach to the high ones and the others catch on and rise up. Not this year… the low ones let the high ones do everything. They are still babies and some have learning issues. I’m also having behavior issues this year, and it’s my smarties that are the behavior problems- hitting, throwing themselves on the floor when we do brain breaks, name calling, being sneaky, etc. and they know my expectations. They think those rules don’t apply to them. It’s been a tough year and my class is known as the one with the behaviors. It probably doesn’t help that I don’t have my own class until after lunch-we are departmentalized. I would love to do something like this activity, but I don’t have long enough ELA blocks with each class.
You all departmentalize in K!?! Wow! I think that would be really difficult!
Love, love, love it! I had to get on tonight and read all about it since I couldn’t come see it in action. You’re so amazing and inspiring! Those kids will NEVER forget kindergarten because of YOU!!!!
Elizabeth!!! All of your ideas are just so precious! Thank you so much for sharing with us! You rock!