First Grade, Grammar, Set Two

• We are working on Capitalization Rules. I found a concise list of rules or standards on-line. I do not plan to cover all the rules this year. So far we have covered:
• First word in a sentence
• Pronoun I (but we call it "the word I" since she had no idea what a pronoun is)
• It is really easy to find free printable worksheets on-line for learning Punctuation and Capitalization.
• Since a field trip was on one of the days we were working on capitalization, on the drive home we looked for capitalized words -- we found that street names, city names, business names, restaurant names, church names, hospital names have capital letters.
• At times we had to really search because a lot of signs have ALL THE LETTERS CAPITALIZED.
• I introduced "naming words" (nouns) this week. The first day we wrote down the names of five people, 5 places, and 5 things. I was surprised that for the people, she didn't just write names, but things like: fireman, postman, etc.
• The second day we worked on naming words, we were at the aquarium. I had written the alphabet on a sheet of paper and we tried to find something there for each letter. We got all of them except for I, Q, X, Y, and Z.
• We started learning where to put commas. (March 24, 2012 and Sally said, "Wow!")
• Another day we learned that commas separate words in a series. I introduced this by pulling out our picture cards and adding some "comma cards" and an ", and" card. We then used the picture cards to make a sentence with a series, and inserted the commas.

The parrot ate a banana, pear, and fish.

The workman had a band aid, bolts, a nut, workers, and a toolbox.

• I had planned on having K. play a syllables game on Learning Games for Kids this week, but we lost our internet connection (long story), so instead I got out the children's dictionary (to find words) and wrote the words on pieces of paper. Then K. cut the words up between the syllables.

• This week we we reviewed Captialization, Punctuation, Syllables, and Naming Words.