Punctuation People!

   One of our first grade standards in SC is to teach students to edit for punctuation,capitalization, and spelling in writing.  For those of you who teach little ones, you can relate.... teaching kids to put correct punctuation marks in writing is SOOOO hard!  They get capital letters for the most part, but having them put periods, question marks, exclamation points, quotation marks, etc is QUITE the task!  So, I decided to make the punctuation marks into "people" with this fun anchor chart and give each mark a little speech bubble with a comment relating to what purpose each mark serves.  They loved helping me make this chart and really loved the little "punctuation people!"  After we wrote down the purpose of each punctuation mark, I had the kids split into collaborative groups and find examples of each punctuation mark within the books in their just-right book boxes.  

Punctuation Pasta

   Another fun thing we will be trying is editing sentences for punctuation using pasta! I saw this cute idea on Education.com, and I just had to try it!  You just use elbow macaroni for commas, spaghetti for exclamation points, and some other different kinds of pastas for the each of the marks. You can make large anchor charts and have the students put pasta pieces in the correct places to "edit" the story for a word work station, or just write sentences on sentence strips and have students put punctuation at the end for an easier version.  Try this with your kiddos...they will love it!