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.
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.
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