I'm always searching for ways to spice up language lessons. Adding punctuation to a paragraph or capitalizing proper nouns is--let's be honest--rather boring. Grammar just doesn't have the same excitement as, say, an action movie. Until today.We were going about our regular morning work, capitalizing those proper nouns and adding punctuation to one big long strung-together set of words posing as a coherent paragraph. "My dad taught me about that!" exclaimed Marcus. "It's a runaway sentence!"
Epilogue: After my initial delight over Marcus' new term, a quick online search revealed that the phrase "runaway sentence" may not be an authentic Marcus Wiley original. Darn! It's always so great when kids create a brand new phrase that's really far more apt than the original. One such term I particularly enjoyed a few years ago was Jamal's name for that tape-dispensing thingy that sits next to the stapler. A tape-ler.
Have you heard of a runaway sentence before? Apparently it's much more out of control than a mere run-on.
Image: www.granitegrok.com
4 comments:
Super cute! I like that phrase. And this is the first I've heard of it, so I'll give the credit to your little one. :)
I love that!
Reading punctuation is made fun by adding some action, at least for us. We used it for writing today too! Stomp when you get to a period, scoot to the side when you see a comma, jump straight up when you see an exclamation mark, and 'wiggle' when you see a question mark.
They LOVE it!
Ooh--adding action is great! I bet they'd like that--and it's a movement break, too! Thanks for passing that along.
Maybe they could take off like a speeding train when they come across a "runaway" sentence.... ;)
I've never heard of it, but I'm going to start using it! It's much more apt and I love the visual :)
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