Dora Learns to Write and in the Process Encounters Punctuation

           Although many teachers and young students do in fact agree that learning punctuation is often on a worksheet or a whiteboard exercise, this article gives a different technique in which you can teach a student to understand the process of punctuation. Pat Cordeiro, the author of  "Dora Learns to Write and in the Process Encounters Punctuation," created an imaginary first-grader named Dora to evaluate and understand that punctuations are more than markings at the end of a page [title of article in quotation marks, not italics].

            As Dora began her writing, she wrote as if her words needed no spacing or punctuation at all. Her words and sentences were written like this, “YERCOMAYERAMOSDARA.” Whether or not people understand this, as the article continued, it was marvelous to look back and realize that this was her starting point. Interestingly, I noticed that the teacher had read and realized that learning to place periods is key, and can potentially provide a window for students to learn about the structures and conventions of THEIR [possessive pronoun] work. Before Dora could get much farther on her work, I noticed that the teacher had questioned her about how the punctuations in her books were related to the words she had written on her papers. As Dora had learned this first step in her way of progress, she thought she would try separating her letters. As Dora continued to show progress, I had noticed that the teacher continued to question Dora’s writing compared to the books that she was reading. As the teacher would question Dora and use their hands to frame the words in Dora’s story, I noticed that Dora would show significant progress, especially when she would communicate with her classmates at the writing table.

As I noticed that the teacher would help correct Dora by asking her to present her writing and reflect upon it, I also noticed that the teacher did not do things that I maybe would have. For example, I maybe would have actually done the worksheets or the whiteboard exercises to possibly reach out to more students than Dora. However, related to Dora, I would have sat down and actually worked with her to show her how to punctuate the end of sentences correctly, rather than slowly working out one kink at a time (which was very interesting to see Dora’s progress), I would have shown her the correct way to punctuate the whole sentence. In other words, WHOSE [possessive pronoun] idea was it to teach young students at such a slow rate anyways? While punctuating full sentences, you can even do worksheets and reflect back to the books Dora has been reading to accomplish the same task. As I said before, it seemed that the teacher had taught Dora one-step at a time. Unfortunately, I believe that this is why it has taken Dora so long to apply the concept of sentence-end-marking. As I was reading this article written by Pat Cordeiro, I was realizing that as Dora was learning new concepts, she was sent back to her desk to re-teach herself and elaborate with her other classmates. Although we read this story without actually knowing how long it took Dora to accomplish sentence-end-marking, I would assume that she actually took quite awhile to accomplish this task.

            During the process of Dora’s accomplishment, I did notice that the teacher did provide positive help and techniques to help her. Some of my favorite school memories include receiving positive feedback when I was young! For example, a teacher could simply say, this author wrote her sentences a lot like YOURS [possessive pronoun]. Although the teacher did read to her to show examples where periods need to be placed, and the teacher asked Dora to read her examples as if it were in her head, the teacher taught in ways that I possibly would have done differently. However, I would conclude that the teacher did an excellent job in successfully teaching a student how to punctuate the ends of sentences correctly.