Lesson #6: Commas, Apostrophes, Quotation Marks

Mrs. Washburn had told me that her students were struggling with apostrophes, commas, and quotation marks and where to put them in a sentence. I wanted to come up with a short dance exercise that would help them with this before moving on to more choreography. However, I struggled coming up with ideas this time. I emailed my mentor and even asked my parents! Both came up with ideas and I took some ideas from both to create what I did—and it worked! 

  We started out by coming up with a movement or shape that would represent a quotation mark and one to represent a comma. I then showed them one sentence on my computer that was missing its commas, quotation marks. I chose enough volunteers for each word in the sentence and they stood up front in a line facing their peers. They then came up with a movement and did that movement while saying the word they represented. I then asked who knew where the quotation marks and comma goes. I chose those with raised hands and they would run up and do the quotation mark or comma movement we had come up with in between the correct people (or words those people represented). We did this a few times with various sentences.

Next, we did a comma exercise. We, again, came up with an apostrophe and an “s” movement. I then told the students to create a movement that would be about 2 counts. Some of the students were confused by this or came up with the same silly moves they always do. I should have given them parameters of what kind of movement to create, something beyond hand gestures. Most of the time just saying, “be creative” doesn't work as I have found. You need to give them ideas and examples to work off of. For the next part of the exercise, we got in one big circle and each student would show their movement. We would then copy it as a class and add on the apostrophe and “s” movement to the end. Therefore, the movement would become, for example, Caleb's movement because we did his movement and then added on an apostrophe 's'. They enjoyed this activity as well.

  

We then went on with the dance. It went okay. While teaching the next parts of the dance, I learned that I need to be very careful with my vocabulary. I sometimes use words that I have used in the past that meant a different thing. If I try to use that term again, the students think I mean what it meant the first time. The students can't read my mind so I must remember to use clear and specific words to convey what I want. We finished learning the majority of the dance. We used a concept from every lesson and I added fun, basic hip hop in between, which they loved! Went well! Lots of practicing for next week!