Over the past few weeks we have been using punctuation to aid our expression when reading aloud. We worked in groups to identify and highlight all the punctuation from pages in the book – ‘The Day the Crayons Quit.’ We worked out what all the punctuation meant and we each took turns to read a section out loud. We were given 2 stars and a wish by the rest of the class and we had to work on improving our wish the following week.

Alex – We had to speak loudly if the word was in capital letters and even louder if it was underlined too.

Albie – When there is an exclamation mark it means you speak louder too.

Erin – You pause when there is a full stop and it’s only a short pause for a comma.

Fern – You are asking a question when there’s a question mark so your voice goes up.

 The whole class then made a book called ‘The Day the Pencils Quit.’ We wrote a letter to Mrs Wight pretending to be a pencil that was not happy and was complaining to her. We used all the punctuation we had learned in our reading to make our pencils sound very grumpy. There were lots of different complaints from all the different coloured pencils.

Our aim was to use a variety of punctuation in our reading and we were all successful at this.

It was open hour when we were redrafting our letter so some visitors got to read them. If you visit our class everyone is more than welcome to read our completed book.