The Importance of Punctuation and Developing Craft

The specific techniques that are explained in Elizabeth Hale's "Crafting Writers" seem to be great approaches to begin using with elementary students.  All five topics that are involved in teaching the craft of writing are important:  the five senses, show not tell, dialogue, sentence variety, and word choice.  My favorite of these that I believe will be used the most in my own classroom, is the five sense technique.  It is very interesting to even ask myself when reviewing my own papers the question, "Am I using descriptive words that use my five sense?"  It is amazing how much better the content and description is when going back and adding the way I felt, the way an object felt, the way the area around me smelled, and how it caused me to feel inside.  This is a technique that I think students could use themselves when reviewing their own work.  For example, I think it would be very beneficial if I made a list of questions that I could ask each individual student when going over their paper.  For example, if one of my students is writing about an instance where he was playing in his little league baseball game and was the hero of the game, I could ask him questions about how it made him feel when he hit the ball to center field or how the ball sounded when it smacked the bat.  By adding small descriptive words it will make the work a lot better, and will also help the reader feel that he is experiencing the story rather than just being told the story.  This is a great example of the next topic that I think it very important, showing not telling.  I know this may be a hard concept fora lot of elementary students to grasp at first.  By saying this repetitively and by leading them to examples will eventually sink in for most students.  When students finally grasp how to show and not tell, their work will tremendously improve and will most likely encourage them to write more.  

Reading the chapter that focused on punctuation was very interesting to me.  I never realized how perceptive children are.  I myself have never really thought deeply about why writers use punctuation, and how it benefits us as readers.  I understand that question marks and exclamation points provide large benefits in pieces of work, but it was interesting to explore the purpose of the period in most instances.  Using correct punctuation is a skill that will come slowly to students.  This is why I feel it is important to do a lot of group guided writing and reading, so that if necessary, I can pause and ask the group, "Why do we put a period here?"  Hopefully by doing this as a group, it will sink in amongst them and they will interact with each other while working on things separately.   Punctuation, variety, and choice of words all play a huge factor in the caliber of a student's work.  Therefore, I feel that it is mandatory to try to have my students read as much work as possible so that they will be accustomed to using different words outside of their normal vocabulary.