Mrs. Condie's Class Visit 4: A Complete Thought

For this lesson Mrs. Condie told me that some of her students were having a harder time understanding that a sentence creates a complete thought that ends in a period or other form of punctuation.  To begin the lesson we created a story as a class that I wrote on the board. (It was a week before Halloween, the story was appropriately about a hungry werewolf on a full moon.) While writing the story on the board I purposefully left out any form of punctuation or capitalization. These was so that we could add it in as a class afterwards. 

Once our story was created we started dancing out the story with a few stipulations. Ever time there was a period they had to freeze, and every time it was a new sentence their movement had to be as big as they could make it (to represent the capitalized letter.) Every time there was a comma they would have to take a audible breath while swinging their body from high to low. When the punctuation was a question mark they had to make a curved shape, and when it was an exclamation mark they had to jump. These requirements made it so that the students had to be aware of where the punctuation was within the story, and hopefully it helped them better understand the concept that a sentence is a complete thought.