FANBOYS and AAAWWUBIS

On Monday, we focused on FANBOYS and how to tell the difference between simple sentences, compound sentences, and complex sentences. I’m not sure that I can still tell the difference between all of them, but I am sure that with practice I will be an expert at it. We also got to listen to a country song and make her simple sentences into compound and complex sentences. It was nice to get to practice with something that wasn’t some hypothetical situation or worksheet. AAAWWUBIS was another thing we went over in class on Monday.

A-Although

A-As

W-When

W-While

U-Until

B-Because

I-If

S-Since

Now, I know that I am supposed to put a comma after these words when they are connecting two sentences together. Barbara went over this with us on the computer with our own sentences; this was so helpful, seeing sentences we created being used to show something we are learning is so great.

Wednesday was another helpful day we had a mini-lesson on commas after introductory elements, and also worked on scrapbook examples. I am so thankful that we have these mini-lessons. It is so great to be able to have short lessons that focus on one aspect of grammar and answer any questions about that specific rule. Stephanie and Shannon really seemed to know what they were talking about and I am happy they did. Scrapbooks seem to be really hard for people to get done in time for the deadline. Barbara noticed this and helped us by giving us almost half the period to find examples for our scrapbooks. It was wonderful to be able to ask her if what I found in the newspapers was actually an error, and to also have her explain what I need to say in my scrapbook to explain the error.

I am still kind of nervous about my grammar, I am never exactly sure when I should put commas and when to leave them out. Some of the time I do it right and some of the time I don’t, I am hoping that practice will help this. Of course I only have a semester to have Barbara pointing out my grammar mistakes, so I had better start learning soon. I have faith in Barbara and faith in myself to learn this stuff, I am trying really hard to not get discouraged about grammar.

Question of the Week:

So, Barbara said that it was optional to put a comma after an AAAWWUBIS, what is the reason for that?

How do we know when to punctuate?

Grammar this week focused on FANBOYS and also on how some teachers explain punctuation to their students FANBOYS was a mini lesson taught by Barbara to help explain how to combine two sentences that relate to one another this was a very good mini lesson that was given to us by starting with the FANBOYS and then when went straight to our own writing to try to find places that we were not using commas and FANBOYS where we needed to in Socratic Seminar we discussed the opinions of an article this article discussed how punctuation is taught in school the wrong way and the correct way the article seemed to feel that punctuation needed to be practiced through a child’s writing instead of doing grammatical drills for punctuation statistics even showed that children who practiced punctuation through writing understood punctuation better than students who worked solely with punctuation drills the author of the text even said that students who hand wrote their piece with no punctuation and then later added punctuation when typing it better understood punctuation and why it show go in certain places I am not sure if I agree or disagree with this statement it seems like students may still have a hard time punctuating correctly when typing their piece out if they do not understand punctuation we also talked about our own personal stories with grammar drills and how they seemed like busy work because they weren’t genuine sentences they look more like computerized sentences using genuine examples from our own actual writing was more helpful because it was authentic and applied to our own outcome of our own paper

Holy Cow! That was so hard! I could not, for the life of me, stop putting punctuation marks into the above block of writing. I kept subconsciously putting at least periods and indentations when my thoughts were changing from one subject to the next. My internal dialogue kept screaming, PUT THE PERIOD! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I had to delete periods that I just automatically put. I feel like putting punctuation in my writing has been so ingrained into my mind that I can’t help but put punctuation. It’s interesting to see how I think about punctuation. I wonder if students feel this way about punctuation. I know that elementary school children do not understand, but what about middle school or even high school students? Do they understand where punctuation goes at least to a point where they have periods where thoughts change or end? How do we get these inner rules that scream at us to PUNCTUATE! I just don’t know. Did anyone else find it ridiculously hard to point out or realize what he or she was thinking while punctuating? Or did it seem like second nature?

Question of the week: Is this a comma splice-

“The more things you have, the more weight to carry, the more gear to worry about.”

Why or why not?