Case+50+-+Ms.+V's+Punctuation+Vacation

In Ms. V’s elementary ESL class, the students were learning about punctuation. Ms. V added a mini-unit about punctuation into her curriculum to help students feel more confident because punctuation is very similar all over the world. In order to provide comprehensible input for her English language learners, Ms. V bought a children’s story from Barnes and Noble. Using Punctuation Takes a Vacation by Robin Pulver, Ms. V planned to show students the personification of punctuation and picture clues to help students to contextualize grammar rules.

Ms. V scanned in three of the thirty-two pages from the book and projected them onto the screen for her students to follow along. She began by introducing the story to her students and showing them the title page with the author's name. While reading the selected pages aloud, she modeled the reading strategies that “good readers” use. She made sure to use context clues, look at the pictures, make connections, inferences and hypothesis of what might happen next. She asked students to close their eyes and visualize the next pages in the book. After Ms. V finished the shared reading, Ms. V projected the letter that the characters in the story wrote to punctuation marks when they took a vacation. She asked the students for help with the letter—what was wrong? What were they writing about? What needed to be fixed? How could they fix the errors? She then led a discussion about the importance of punctuation and pushed students to think why punctuation is so important in their writing.

Afterward, Ms. V handed out postcards that she had written without punctuation. Since the post cards were anonymous (they knew that each is from a punctuation mark, but they didn’t know which punctuation sent each card), the students played a Guess Who game. Depending on the writing style (if there are lots of commas, or multiple question marks), students had to guess who sent each post card.