When
reading “DORA LEARNS TO WRITE”,
my first thought was: “There
has to be a better way to teach punctuation.”[Originally I had the
title in italics] The author of this article talks about how some
children she has taught still put periods in between every word by
the time they are in third grade. I have never known a child who
still thought they should do that after first grade. I think it is a
serious problem that by that age, children do not know how to use
punctuation in this story.
I do not have much experience with teaching this age group, most of
my experience has been with middle schoolers and high schoolers, so I
am no expert on teaching punctuation to someone who is just learning
to write. The only experience I have had with teaching this age
group punctuation has been with my little brother. He and I used to
work on his homework together. (compound subject with 2 personal
pronouns.) If someone else has had more experience, I would be glad
to hear about yours. Whoever has a good strategy should share it.
(Sentence using whoever.) I think a possible helpful tool for
teaching punctuation might be worksheets with sentences, and students
could have contests to see who could fill in the punctuation
correctly.
In the story, to help Dora figure out where to put punctuation the
teacher suggests to her to put the periods where “...we let our
voice drop down, like this.” I think THIS IS a good strategy. (I
think using suggestions is a good strategy.) It helps children get
on the right path to learning where to put periods.
Dora and her teacher have a unique strategy for working with
punctuation. (Compound subject.) Dora's teacher does not correct
Dora when she puts periods in between clauses. I think THIS IS a
good strategy for when you are just beginning to teach punctuation.
(I think letting students make their own theories at the beginning is
a good strategy.) It lets the student begin to form their own
theories on punctuation, but I think after a few weeks, the teacher
should start correcting problems she sees. It is hard to break a
pattern when it is already a habit of theirs. It would be simpler to
correct issues during the beginning, instead of trying to undo years
of bad habits.
I think it takes Dora so long to apply the concept of end of the
sentence punctuation because she was not corrected along the way.
Since she was allowed to come up with her own theories she spent lots
of time struggling with different strategies for using periods. I
think that if the teacher had gently corrected her from the
beginning, they could have saved time.
After reading through your work, I would have to say that I like your point of view and found no errors that I could see. I really did like the changes you made and how they made your post stronger than it was before. You used the POW correctly as far as i could tell.
ReplyDeleteGood work,
Jeremy Jans