Sally Coons, Dee Doucette, Danna Agha, Sergio Toro

Today we did a few activities as part of The Grand Punctuation Workshop. Our group’s favorite activity was Workstation H: Active Punctuation. To do the activity, we took on two roles. Danna stood in the middle while Sally, Dee, and Sergio stood in a circle around her. Danna read the story, If You Give A Mouse A Muffin… aloud. In this version of the story, the punctuation was spelled out in words. While Danna read, the rest of us walked in a circle around her. When she said a punctuation word, we did an action. For comma, we slowed down; for period, we stopped walking; for exclamation point, we stopped and jumped; for question mark, we stopped and scratched our heads; and for colon and semicolon, we made up our own actions.

We feel that students can benefit from this activity, because they will link the common punctuation marks with physical actions which represent the effects of the punctuation marks on the text around them.

This activity was very fun and we feel students could really benefit from listening to the commands as they engage in physical activity as well. While they are being stimulated physically, mentally they are retaining information about context and punctuation in a kinesthetic way. 10/10!