Punctuation

Punctuation is always an ongoing area of focus in my classroom for all year groups, no matter what topic we are studying. My T.A. has helped me produce these punctuation booklets for discrete practise.

The activities all focus on Capital Letters, "Speech Marks" and Commas for Clauses (e.g. My dog, who is called Pickle, likes to bark in the garden.) Pam Hook , the SOLO Guru, has kindly offered to send me a table which will explain how I can 'SOLO-ise' punctuation, as I'm still confused about that at the moment.

Using highlighters to check punctuation progress

An ongoing focus in my classroom is improving our use of punctuation. To check on individual progress I had students copy a mini-story from the board, and they had to put in capital letters, commas and speech marks. We then peer marked the work. Markers had to highlight the things they thought were correct, incorrect or missing in three different colours. I could then quickly see how both the original student and the marker are getting on. Plus the highlighters emerging from the cupboard always seems to send a stir of excitement around the room!

Climate Change: Persuasive writing

This half term Year 7 and 8 have been investigating Climate Change. We have assessed our understanding of the issue with SOLO Taxonomy. This has culminated in writing a persuasive letter for our school newspaper to encourage both parents and students to reduce their carbon footprint. We are still in the rough draft stages.

Persuasive writing is not a new topic to us, last half term we investigated the Romans and wrote persuasive letters about Gladiator fighting. This time we had to revise the techniques and come up with some snappy sentence starters before we began to plan the structure of our letters. You can see our progress below, we've still go some way to go before we finish!

 

This is a writing frame that 3 students came up with. The topic of the paragraph is in blue, the 'super sentence starter' is in red, and the persuasive technique is in black.

 

 

Here you can see two rough drafts. They haven't stuck exactly to plan, but that's okay, I do encourage students to 'go with the flow' sometimes.

 

Next we will read our letters and check for capitals, commas and full stops (highlighters will probably be used) and then we'll do a little bit of peer assessment- mostly along the lines of "my favourite sentence was...because...I think you could improve this sentence...by...") Students can then make a few changes before I mark it, and finally they can write it up in neat.