"Walter the Farting Dog" and some serious punctuation

Yesterday (Thursday) we looked at the text called Water the Farting Dog by William Kotzwinkle and Glenn Murray as part of our focus on the use of speech marks and the use of dialogue in texts. There were three levels of difficulty of the passages distributed, mainly in relation to length; all were obviously excerpts from the book with most of the punctuation missing. Students had to punctuate the text they were given individually. They were given ten minutes.

Once this was completed, they worked through it with a partner, discussing the application of punctuation and making any necessary corrections. They then made a group of four, discussed the text further and then wrote the text up.

The write-up

We then went through the three texts using the Smart Board with students each having a section to punctuate on the board, or read out aloud with the new punctuation added, thus demonstrating the importance punctuation has for the reader when reading it aloud with expression and the correct diction. Students were asked to add in anything they missed at this final stage.

The correcting and modelling

The students' work was then collected up and assessed. Students were asked to use different-coloured pens or pencils at each proof-reading stage so I could determine the level of learning obtained at each given point in this lesson. Some students need to be much more through with their final correction, whilst others had been extremely vigilant and accurate.

Today, a very expressive and confident grade 6 boy read the book to the class (as my throat was very sore), and he did a fantastic job.