Teaching with Puppets!

This week I introduced 2 more puppets to my class, Capital Cam and Punctuation Patty.

Capital Cam and Punctuation Patty generally come out together and give out double cheek kisses during writing if students remember to use a capital letter to start their sentences and punctuation to end their sentences. Both puppets came in a set of 8, buy yours here.

Capital Cam - On Thursday Capital Cam came to our English class (a 50 minute period, once a day), and taught my students all about CAPITAL LETTERS and when to use them. After the students met Capital Cam, they practiced using capital letters in the 4 main ways that Capital Cam introduced to them. While the students are writing, Capital Cam loves to circulate and give out high 5's and kisses to all the students that are using capital letters properly. Capital Cam arrived last year in Grade 1 and has made his permanent home here. I absolutely love using him to reinforce the proper use of capital letters during writing time. I would have had liked to make a new anchor chart for him this year, but our large flip chart paper is an extremely precious resource as it is ordered from Lakeshore Learning and shipping costs are high. So in the name of conservation I just went over everything again with markers as the hot Taiwan sun had faded it pretty bad.

Teaching with Puppets - Capital Cam reinforces the proper use of capital letters during writing. Just noticed that one of my students photo bombed my pic haha. 

Punctuation Patty - On Friday, Capital Cam's girlfriend, Punctuation Patty, moved into our classroom and taught the students all about punctuation! The students then practiced writing sentences and questions using periods, question marks and exclamation marks. Punctuation Patty then made her rounds and gave out kisses and high 5's to everyone that used punctuation properly. Capital Cam and Punctuation Patty generally come out together and give out double cheek kisses during writing if students remember to use a capital letter to start their sentences and a period to end their sentences. Using puppets to reinforce punctuation and capital letters is one of my favourite tools that I use in my classroom. Students begin to immediately self-correct their writing as soon as they see my little puppet friends come out! I might use another precious piece of imported flip chart paper to make her a new anchor chart as I would like to add '"commas" to the list of punctuation. Or I might make a 2nd anchor chart to introduce further punctuation for my students that are ready to use more in their writing. As of now, periods, question marks and exclamation marks are enough to learn to use properly for my little EAL monkeys!

Teaching with Puppets - Punctuation Patty reinforces the use of proper punctuation during writing.