Sunday, September 8, 2013

Dora

      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. If someone else has had more experience, I would be glad to hear about yours. 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. It helps children get on the right path to learning where to put periods.
        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. 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.   

1 comment:

  1. Paul, I'm only seeing one possessive pronoun from our list; you should have had 3, total. Also, you need to indicate the POW in all caps at the end of the sentence so your readers can spot it easily. In other words, label them in the future.

    ReplyDelete