First grade students have been and will continue practicing writing sentences, or complete thoughts. As we write, we are noticing the importance of punctuation. Throughout the school year, we have identified various forms of punctuation as they occur in our learning environment and briefly discussed how and when each is used. Today, we extended our learning by reading aloud Punctuation Takes a Vacation. In the story, the punctuation marks in Mr. Wright’s class decided to take a vacation. The students quickly noticed that without punctuation, nothing made sense. While away, the punctuation marks write postcards in the form of riddles to the class. We enjoyed identifying who each of the postcards were written by and will use these clues to help us remember how and when to use each form of punctuation. Each of the following will be addressed in first grade.
- period – used as a stop sign at the end of a sentence, also used in abbreviations
- question mark – used at the end of a question
- exclamation point – used after a word or sentence that expresses strong emotion
- comma – used to separate items in a series or a list
- apostrophe – takes the place of a letter, changing two words into one, also used with the letter s to show ownership or possession
- colon – used to tell time, separates the hours from the minutes
- quotation marks – used at the beginning and end of the words a person speaks
