What is Sensei’s teaching challenge this week?

I thought that knowing how to use the comma was a given for my Year 1 students, but it turned out to be something novel for them. They had little understanding of how to use the comma.

As an eager teacher, I wanted to impart to them the finer points of punctuation. So, I diligently got them to write example sentences and patiently explained the usage to them. Unfortunately, my effort was a Big Bang failure. When I got them to do a worksheet, I was horrified to see that they had inserted the comma at random places.

As such, it was back to the drawing board for me. I needed to teach them how to use the comma in a different way. Leveraging my keen understanding of teenagers’ psyche, I decided to incorporate movement and visuals into the next lesson.

Movement and visuals sounds very bombastic, but it actually boiled down to simple things. I gave each student a piece of paper that had one written word and asked them to arrange the words (and themselves) in the right order. Then, I called upon other students, affectionately addressed as my Comma Specialist, to insert themselves in the right place.

Of course, the Comma Specialists got it wrong sometimes, but this just created an opportunity for me to address their misconception. Here is a photo of me declaring sagely to put a comma before “and” to separate a list of things.

Through this exercise, I was able to impress upon them the importance of the comma. When we deliver a speech, we pause occasionally. A comma will signal to us to pause so that we create a break in our flow of words and facilitate our audience’s listening. I hope that they will learn to use commas a a tool to help them catch their breath while speaking - just like how inhaling becomes important during swimming.

In addition, they learnt how to write the introduction for their presentation script.