Team J's Second Grade Fun: Comma Practice

We recently covered commas in my class. I've always found commas kind of a boring thing to teach so I tried to spice it up a bit this year. I've also always found that they confuse kids. When you use them? When you don't? When you need more than one? And so on..

So here's what I did this year...

We started out by watching a Brainpop Jr on Commas that went over the basics. Then, we created the anchor chart below together. I decided to focus on using commas in a list, to separate two adjectives, separate city and state, and using commas in a date. I feel like these four were age-appropriate for second grade and ones they'd be able to understand. When creating the chart, I had the kids help me. I wrote the topic and they came up with the sentences. This sparked great conversation because if someone didn't use the commas correctly we could discuss why.

After creating our chart, we read the book below - When Comma Came to Town. This is a cute book and explores commas in a silly way. I highly recommend Grammar Tales - they have books on many different grammar topics.

Then, we practiced in small groups. We used my comma practice for separating words in a list from my Grammar Fix It - Commas product in my TPT store. Students have to fix the errors in the sentence and re-write the sentence correctly on their recording sheet (included in the product). In this one, students had to fix the capitals, end marks, and comma errors.

Then, later in the week we worked on Grammar Fix It - Commas whole group. This time I projected the sentence onto the board and students had to fix the errors and re-write the sentence correctly on their white board. They were looking for comma, capital, and end mark errors. After the students finished writing their sentence on their individual white board, we corrected the sentence together on the board.