Something I wish we’d talked about more on Thursday was how to best help our students through learning new concepts. While self-discovery is great, how do we best resist the urge to mark up their papers and just give them the answers? Dora’s teacher seemed to have endless patience and knew just the right way to help her get to where she needed to go without stifling her learning process. I guess I’m just concerned that I won’t know how to act with my students and will make a huge mess of everything if I’m not amazing like Dora’s teacher right off the bat.
So, what is (in your opinion) the best way to help a student understand where they’re going wrong with their punctuation?
It's like Barbara said, we sit them down and ask them why they used punctuation when they did, explain to them in person what was wrong and allow them to fix it. But even before doing this with them, teaching them about grammar rules as the opportunity presents itself and then having them pull out their writing to find it themselves. Barbara said they won't learn the rule if they don't find their errors themselves.
ReplyDeleteSo I would say slowly stretching grammar out over time, and revisiting it as neccessary, is the most effective way to teach them what is correct. While also making it as fun as you can!