Creative Punctuation Review Games

One of the teachers that I teach inclusion with is presently going over punctuation with the eighth grade students. When introducing punctuation or in our case, reviewing it, the best was to start teaching it is the old fashioned lecture, and pen and paper method. But as your students get better at using the correct punctuation, and as a review, there are a few creative ways to teach or review the skills of punctuation with your students.

1) One of those is by using punctuation bingo. One of the best Punctuation Bingo games I have used is by Trend Enterprises. It comes with 30 separate cards with different sentences, not punctuated, and formatted a bit differently than the basic bingo card. There are two rows, with five sentences in each row. The teacher has a set of calling cards, where she will call and read the sentence. She also has what amounts to a poster with the answers of the correct punctuation. The best way to play is to laminate the cards, and to give the students an erasable marker to place the correct punctuation with on their cards. I tried making cards with the punctuation marks to be placed on each square, but lamenting the sheet works better.

2) The next creative way to review bingo is to have human punctuation marks. I pick a reading selection, take out the punctuation and make copies for all students. I then chose the correct number of students to match the correct number of punctuation marks the story has. I assign a student a hanging card that says what their punctuation mark is. I then assign a sound to each mark. It is best to keep the sounds simple, such as pop, whiz, and click. For example, the student being the period would wear a hanging name tag for the entire class to see. When I would read a sentence that required a period, he would simply say "pop." The kids love this activity, and all want to participate.

3) Sometimes I review using index cards, and a game I created. I create sentences, writing each word on a 4 by 6 index card. I then lay the cards out on the floor, to make the sentence, minus the punctuation. We usually play in teams, and the students are given index cards with different punctuation marks. The students job is to find the correct punctuation mark and place it where it belongs in the sentence. This of course takes a lot of index cards. Colored index cards work better, as it has been proven that certain colors, such as blue and dark green, increase comprehension and learning.

After you have given the traditional lecture and practice on punctuation, these games are excellent ways to review sentence structure and punctuation. These work especially well for children who learn by doing.