Punctuation is such a hard concept for students to understand. It’s not the easiest concept to teach either. I really love Michelle Oakes unit of Punctuation People. The kids are able to connect the punctuation marks to characters and that seems to make it meaningful.
We finished the week off by being “Punctuation Detectives”. I gave each kiddo a magnifying glass and we first searched for sight words. I know this is a long passage for Kinders so maybe you could use it with your higher group or in small groups. My kids were able to handle it so we did it whole group.
There are a lot of sight words in this passage for students to identify. They love using their magnifying glasses to look for the words. This little guy even through in a flashlight because the magnifying glass just wasn’t doing enough…
After we read through it a few times and identified the sight words, students had to go through and circle the punctuation marks with different colored crayons. They circled the periods in red, the question marks with blue and exclamation marks with green.
After they identified the punctuation marks, we graphed it.
I did this activity with some of my guided reading groups this week. It gives students a good visual of how they should be using their voice to show expression when they read. There was a book that we read this week in small groups that had mostly question marks in it. After we read through the book and did this graph, the students were able to see that they should read the book using their questioning voice. I model how different sentences sound and it brings awareness to the students in a different way.
After we did this passage, the final product looked like this.
You can use this passage or just the punctuation graph!
Click on the pictures below to grab this activity!
We used this yesterday and my kids LOVED it! Thank you so much.