2nd and 3rd Graders Go on a Punctuation Hunt

Miss Apostrophe

It was the day before National Punctuation Day, and as the actual holiday occurred during home study days, Miss N decided to celebrate with her class early. The first act of the day (after pledges and Bible) was to have her students paint their very own cardboard punctuation marks. The 3rd grade wanted to do a repeat of last year's end punctuation: period, exclamation point, question mark. But no, said their teacher. Those are reserved for the 2nd graders. And so the older students found themselves with the more daunting colon, hyphen, and quotation marks. The morning continued with listening to a couple picture books about punctuation and being mesmerized with musical videos about Don Period, Ma and Pa Rentheses, and The Commas and the Stoppers ("Punctuation People" via YouTube). There were also some monotonous worksheets thrown in. But the crowning success of the holiday was the punctuation hunt. Each child had his or her assigned punctuation mark, soon to be pinned on their chests once the paint dried. Now it was time to search though the classroom library books to find their given punctuation. How the colon or hyphen were to manage was a lingering fear in the teacher's mind, but with a hold on her pad of shiny stickers, she let her students loose. "I found an exclamation point!" cried one. "I found a question mark," squealed another, and they came hurrying to show their teacher so she could smack a sticker on their desk. But what of the colon and the hyphen? To Miss N's shock and pleasure, her students were thoroughly up to the challenge and were constantly calling for her to look at the next mark they found. The hunt was a success, and Miss N was left with a more bare-looking sheet of stickers. So rounded out yet another year of celebrating Punctuation Day, reminding us that punctuation is not only important, but fun!