With Good Grammar only two months away (you can pre-order it now for 25% off and free shipping by using the code RAVEN25) and the end of the school year days away, I thought I would share one of my favorite end-of-the-year grammar and language lessons—one that is both really fun and also really useful for helping students to more effectively use and retain our punctuation lessons from throughout the year. 

The concept behind it is simple, and I am hardly the first to notice it*: If you want to see interesting punctuation usage, the best places to go are often the shortest texts—specifically poetry and picture books. 

What makes poetry and picture books such wonderful playgrounds for punctuation is that they are short, and yet their authors need them to be rich with meaning and voice. This is where punctuation enters.

Those little dots and slashes were invented for a reason. They were meant to add the humanity of a human speaker, even when the speaker isn’t present. I often refer to them as conductors who set the emotional tone, guide the cadence, and help us to process the twists, turns, starts, and stops of a piece. And they do it with remarkable efficiency, which makes them the perfect tool for poets, picture book authors, and others who need to say a lot in a small space. 

Brett Vogelsinger (2023) captures this all really well in his book Poetry Pauses when he says, “contrary to what students believe, punctuation simplified the language, rather than complicated it” (pp. 144–145). 

The lesson below is meant to help students to see the simplification and joy that can come with punctuation while also improving their understanding of how to use it in their writing (and with a little luck hold onto it for the next year too). I often run it as a two-day lesson, even though it takes less than a class period to do, for reasons that become clear in the fourth step. Here it is:

1. We begin by discussing why punctuation exists again. By now, we’ve already discussed the role that punctuation plays as a conductor multiple times, but it is always worth doing some retrieval practice when one gets a chance. 
2. Next, we then discuss the Vogelsinger quote above and why poets and picture books so often have really interesting and fun use of punctuation.
3. We then look at a range of poems and picture books. This year we looked at the wonderful…
   1. Jean Reidy and Lucy Ruth Cummins book Truman and its lovely use of dashes and colons
   2. Langston Hughes’ “Dream Boogie” (which follows up on our look at “Harlem” earlier this year) and how it uses dashes, colons, and hyphens to chop up the beat of its own boogie established at the start
   3. And the newest Newberry Winner, David Eggers’ The Eyes & the Impossible and the way it ignores 90% of commas and adds a few extra dashes to properly capture the canine cadence of its protagonist.

4. I usually plan the lesson to end here for the day and give the students one of the more entertaining pieces of homework for the year: Go home and look through their own favorite picture books, poems, comics, or even video games for interesting punctuation and bring in an example of some short work with interesting punctuation to share with the class.
5. The next day, they share examples by dropping them into a big Google Doc that is organized by punctuation mark. This moment, where all of these interesting uses of punctuation come together in a single doc, is really fun, and we normally take a few minutes to look at and admire it. 
6. Lastly, the students then create their own poem or picture book that uses the punctuation in interesting ways. 

This lesson is a good example of what I seek to achieve with May lessons in that its design is one of simultaneously looking backwards and forwards. Specifically, it looks back through retrieval and reflection—which helps to further solidify those concepts—while also looking to the future by giving students a clear narrative concerning how much they’ve learned and what it will mean for them going forward into the next grade. 

Speaking of the next year, this is my last post for a few weeks as I wrap up the school year. I plan to get things rolling again in late June, so until then I hope that you have a wonderful end of the school year and some time away from all things education to celebrate the coming of summer.

Thanks for reading, and yours in teaching,

Matt

*For those interested in going deeper into both this idea and the idea of using poetry and picture books to examine all sorts of unexpected things, I recommend checking out both Poetry Pauses by Brett Vogelsinger and Text Structures From Picture Books by Stephen Briseño, Kayla Briseño, and Gretchen Bernabei.

For those interested in learning more…

Join my mailing list and you will receive a thoughtful post about finding balance and success as a writing teacher (ideally) each week along with exciting subscriber-only content. Also, as an additional thank you for signing up, you will also receive a short ebook on how to cut feedback time without cutting feedback quality that is adapted from my book Flash Feedback: Responding to Student Writing Better and Faster – Without Burning Out from Corwin Literacy.