style="font-size:15px;"> The book is for anyone, but should particularly help learners in Key Stage 2 and 3 (aged 9–15) who:
• prefer to learn by seeing and doing, not extensive reading and/or listening
• have tried traditional SPAG strategies but with limited success
• find it difficult to remember and generalise punctuation rules
• have attentional difficulty and/or poor sequential processing skills
• have dyslexia or other specific learning difficulty (SpLD).
I have used the multisensory strategies (building blocks for complex and compound sentences, thumbs for possessive apostrophes, and folded paper for contracting apostrophes) with Year 5 (aged 9–10) and Year 6 (aged 10–11) children, who worked very enthusiastically and were certainly not too young to grasp the complexities of written English language.
If introduced at any point during Key Stage 3, the book can support effective GCSE revision. In the words of the parents of a student I tutored, ‘the penny has to drop’ before the learner has the confidence to engage with structured SPAG tasks.
How does the book work?
The book assists in development of punctuation skills via enquiry-based learning (also known as problem-based learning), where cartoons are problems to work out in order to understand how punctuation works, and also to make the reader smile. The humorous drawings make the book a visual guide that demands immediate focus and provides humour. Most importantly, the cartoons assist readers in working out punctuation problems themselves before referring to written summaries of rules.
Humour is a kind of play used in the book to challenge the learner’s way of thinking about punctuation. Unexpected punch lines suddenly make the dreaded subject funny, thus less daunting. Continuous elements of surprise strengthen the process of self-discovery and consolidate learning when ‘Aha!’ moments are shared, the way jokes are passed around. The student does not need to read the book ‘from cover to cover’ but can dip in and out, as they would treat a traditional joke book.
Tricky Punctuation in Cartoons is a visual guide and workbook in one. It encourages a flexible approach to working with punctuation rules, shifting the focus away from deductive to inductive learning. This bottom-up approach enables the learner to move from something specific to more general, to detect patterns from examples and to infer rules. Instead of a rule-driven approach, it is a rule-discovery one. Using problem-based learning, the learner gradually becomes proficient in generalising their new knowledge onto other areas of literacy. Without abandoning elements of deductive teaching altogether, in order to help consolidate newly discovered knowledge, summaries and additional explanations are provided in text boxes.
English and SEN teachers are likely to agree that it is not possible to teach punctuation marks without placing them within the context of grammatical structures. In the second part of the book, alongside implicit humour, concrete props are introduced in the form of building blocks, the student’s hands and folded paper. These have positive association with play that effectively bridges the gap between the concrete and more abstract contents. The book replaces the auditory/oral instruction with a visual/practical one, putting the student in control, particularly
those with SpLD/dyslexia. The Answer Key at the end of the book is available to download from www.jkp.com/catalogue/book/9781787754027.
The book is not a structured literacy programme. It does not replace any part of current literacy instruction at school. It is intended to complement it to equip the learners with additional ways to remember tricky punctuation rules.
1
Why We Need Punctuation
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll… Actually, Zed, my robot assistant, will read you a story.
Thanks for helping Billy get out of the house.
THANKS FOR HELPING BILLY GET OUT OF THE HOUSE
Wait! That’s a wrong story. Billy is not a boy and he definitely doesn’t have a leg in plaster. Billy is a mad dog that always gets into trouble.
Thanks for helping, Billy. Get out of the house!
STOP AND THINK
How did Zed mix the two stories?
It read the two sentences as one because it didn’t see the full stop. It didn’t read the comma or exclamation mark, either.
YOU CANT READ PUNCTUATION MARKS
Ah… They are not words, but they tell us a lot about the sentence we are reading. Punctuation might still be a problem for robots but shouldn’t be for humans. As soon as children become readers, they know when to change their voice depending on the punctuation mark they see in the sentence.
WHY ROBOTS STRUGGLE TO READ LIKE HUMANS
The human voice can go up and down – we call that intonation.
We also use our hands and arms, and move heads during speaking – this is called gesticulation (because we use gestures). The challenge is to teach robots to use believable intonation and gesticulation. Think of the two – intonation and gesticulation – as uniquely human paints that colour our speech. They make it more interesting for our listeners and readers, and help them focus on what we are saying.
OVER TO YOU
A sentence starts with a capital letter and needs at least one punctuation mark. Three different punctuation marks can be placed at the end of a sentence (not all at once!). Do you know which ones?
DID YOU KNOW?
If you have ever heard that punctuation marks are used ‘where we would pause during speaking or reading’, that is not entirely correct.
Yes, we do pause after full stops, question marks and exclamation marks – they are all at the end of a sentence. When punctuation marks are inside sentences, it’s a bit more complicated. So, for now, it’s best to think of pausing mostly at the end of the sentence.
Are any punctuation marks more important than others? Some are certainly used more often than others. Imagine a pizza made of all the punctuation marks. What would be the biggest slice: full stops, colons, question marks, exclamations marks or commas?
If you said full stops, you’re right. Most sentences have a full stop at
