Effie – Activity #3: "Friends From the Heart & Punctuation Review"
Activity 3: “Friends From the Heart & Punctuation Review”
This idea provides teachers with a new way to select student partners. As well, the activity is designed to help in the understanding of quotation marks and other punctuation.
Part I:
Friends From the Heart
Materials:
- Red construction paper (9” x 12”)
- Scissors
- Thick black felt pen
Teacher Preparation:
- Pre-cut enough large red construction paper hearts for each PAIR of students
- Using a black felt pen, draw a different jagged or ‘puzzle-piece’ line down the centre of each heart
- Cut each heart along your jagged line, making two halves. If you have an odd number of students, cut one heart into thirds.
Step by Step:
Step One: Mix and place all puzzle-cut, halved hearts in a container.
Step Two: Have each student select a half a heart and write their name on their half.
Step Three: The students then finds the classmate who has the other half of the heart.
Step Four: Pairs are formed and ready for the following activity or can be partners for all kinds of activities during the day.
Part II:
Quotation Review
Materials:
- Highlighters
- Story Handout (provided)
- Effie’s Face (provided)
- Interspaced sentence strips
Teacher Preparation:
- Use “Friends from the Heart” to put students into pairs
- Print Effie’s face onto an overhead transparency
- Project this large image, trace it onto a large piece of paper, paint it and outline in thick black felt pen
- Print enough of the Story Handout for each student
- Prepare enough interspaced sentence strips so each student receives three.
Step by Step:
Step One: Using the Effie book as a visual aid, review with the students what the text looks like when Effie is speaking in a loud voice. Review what the tone of Effie’s voice might be when the sentences look that way. (Bold, capital letters, etc.)
Step Two: Review what punctuation is used to let us know when Effie is making a loud statement and when Effie is asking a question in a loud voice (exclamation marks, question marks, etc).
Step Three: Have each student read the story silently from their Story Handout, highlighting all the sentences that identify Effie is speaking as they read through it.
Step Four: In their pairs, have one student read aloud the highlighted sentences that show that Effie is making a loud statement (exclamation marks). Have the other student read aloud the highlighted sentences that show that Effie is asking a question (question marks).
Step Five: Provide some examples on the board that have punctuation missing. Review the placement of quotation marks.
Step Six: Using their sentence strips, have the students select 3 sentences from the story where Effie is speaking and copy them onto their strips. Have the pair support each other. Emphasize the importance of the following:
- All the words in the sentence are there.
- All the punctuation is correct.
- The spelling of the words is correct.
- The student’s handwriting is displaying careful formation.
- The students are creative in showing capital letters to make it look ‘loud’ for the reader.
OPTION:
Using a computer, have students type Effie’s sentences, encouraging the students to use the appropriate punctuation, capital/lower case letters, bold or regular font shades.
End Product:
Have the sentence strips displayed on the bulletin board with the large image of Effie’s face that was prepared at the start. Adhere them to the display to look like Effie is shouting these sentences.
3 - Effie #3