It's All About the Punctuation!

How does the author share their thoughts and feelings with the reader?  Through a well told story and the effective use of a variety of punctuation and font styles.Our newest writing unit is on recognizing our audience and writing for our readers.  The idea that someone else is going to read their writing is not new to the students but understanding and learning what helps make their writing interesting to readers is.

We began the unit by going to our classroom library and looking at the books.  What are our favorite authors doing in their writing that we can emulate?  Students looked for different punctuation that was used, from dashes, to parenthesis, to commas, and quotation marks.  We then created a list for us to use as a reference tool on what each punctuation mark is, how it is used, and examples from our favorite author's work.

I will post our punctuation table later (it is on my school computer) but here are a few pictures of the team doing some hunting through books.