Punctuation Takes a Vacation is a wonderful picture book where Mr. Wright's students, frustrated by punctuation rules, wish it away. When all the punctuation (literally) goes on vacation, chaos ensues as the students try to understand reading and writing!
This is a writer's notebook-friendly lesson! This write-up has been recently revised to incorporate the creation of a writer's notebook page as part of its pre-writing process. A teacher model of the notebook page can be seen at left. On the teacher instructions page for this lesson you can read the step-by-step instructions for this writer's notebook task , which makes use of our webmaster's "Margin Mascot," Mr. Stick.
You can visit WritingFix's Writer's Notebook Resources Homepage to access more lessons and prompts revised to inspire effective modeling of writer's notebooks for our student writers.
A wonderful inspiration!
Three-Sentence Overview of this Lesson:
In Disney's The Incredibles, each animated family member has a unique power, and together they form an interesting family. For this assignment, students will create an imaginary family, and each family member will be associated with a different piece of punctuation, or with a different part of speech. Once the "family" has been introduced through techniques of personification in a writer's notebook, the students can create longer stories about their personified punctuation characters during an upcoming writer's workshop block.Teachers: Click here to see the entire lesson plan.
6-Trait Overview for this Lesson:
The focus trait for this writing prompt is conventions; your self-expressive learners will appreciate the chance to show creative thinking about punctuation or parts of speech. The support trait for this assignment is idea development; encourage your students to be as creative as possible as they introduce their family members.
