Kim Liebhaber

English 326

Blog #2

Dora

Exploring New Boundaries With Punctuation 

At the beginning, the teacher wanted Dora to connect the letters with sounds. Easily, Dora would write down the letters that went she thought matched the sounds initially from what she heard in the words. For example, “YER” portrayed the sound as “We are.” Then the teacher simply asked Dora to separate the letters and create them into words. The separation of words led to periods and Dora putting periods after every word she thought had ended. This helped her understand what letters broke off into words. Noticing that every word didn’t end in a period Dora started to understand the spacing between each word, she caught on without the teachers help. Now the punctuation aspect plays a role in the rules Dora needed to figure out. At such a young age children, like Dora, are taking on major steps of writing, whose main goal plays a huge part in further punctuation learning.

The teacher allowed Dora to read her “sentences” out loud and helped her define what a true sentence was and what an unnecessary marking was. Dora initially focused on writing instead of punctuating her sentences and over loading them with period markings. “Periods go at the end of the page,” this was Dora’s logic and went with it without the teachers help.

The teacher chose to not approach Dora with her learning habit. Children grow with their intellectual abilities, just like spelling, they learn to catch on as to what is wrong and what is right. By learning through mistakes Dora could incorporate why certain punctuation has its abilities to be swapped around with different meanings. The teacher guiding Dora in the right direction didn’t want to suffocate her with what she will be able to grow into. She allowed Dora to talk and reflect on her work and criticize it how she wants it. She begins to formulate her sentences, not with proper punctuation, but through further writing experiences. The teacher allowed Dora to explore her own writing by not following a particle format, the context and format being entirely theirs. Theirs to understand and guidelines that didn’t have deeper explanation that confused them more.

It was hard for her to catch on to the concept of sentence-end-marking because she seemed more focused on writing what she saw. She didn’t understand what word usage you needed to use to make up an actual sentence. She didn’t understand the definition of a sentence but she heard it. She was unaware as to what she saw on the paper. What she communicated with the teacher was a lot different than being able to break it up onto a piece of paper. It was hard for her to perceive the word how she wrote it which made it difficult for her to break apart each line into a sentence.