Welcome to this Lesson:
Puns and
Punctuation
reviewing dialogue punctuation with a Tom Swiftie challenge for writers' notebooks
This notebook lesson was created by NNWP Consultant Corbett Harrison. Access Corbett's collection of lessons at his personal website.
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The mentor text:
The Tom Swift adventure series sparked a new kind of dialogue-based pun that students can be taught. Review punctuation rules and celebrate word choice with this lesson!
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 This is a writer's notebook-friendly lesson! This lesson has been recently revised to incorporate the creation of a writer's notebook page as part of the pre-writing process. A teacher model of the notebook page can be seen at left. Click on the image at left to see a full-page, printable version of the writer's notebook page inspired by this newly revised lesson. You can visit WritingFix's Writer's Notebook Resources Homepage to access more lessons and prompts revised to inspire effective modeling of writer's notebooks for our student writers.
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A great classroom resource!
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Overview of this Notebook Lesson:
Early on, I trained my students to independently devote pages of their notebooks to classroom topics that interested them or touched their funny bones. In Marissa Moss's Amelia's Notebook, Amelia devotes a notebook page to analyzing people's different noses, which prompts my writers to ask, "We can do stuff like that in our writer's notebook?" The answer is yes; the notebook should be discussed as a "storeroom" for future writing topics, and single notebook page's devoted to ideas the students personally found interesting can easily be used as the basis for a longer piece of writing at a later date. This lesson demonstrates one way a whole class can be taught to set-up a page devoted to a topic that celebrates language, and challenged to independently return to that page as the semester and year progress.
This lesson is devoted to Tom Swifties, which are a type of dialogue pun inspired by the writing style of Victor Appleton--the pseudonym for writer Edward L. Stratemeyer; the history of Tom Swifties is shared on this lesson's Teacher Instructions page, and many examples are also provided. For this lesson, students will examine some Tom Swiftie dialogue puns, paying special attention to their punctuation. First in groups and then as individuals, students will create their own Tom Swiftie puns for their writer's notebooks or for a classroom collection set-up by the teacher. |
6-Trait Overview for this Lesson:
The focus trait in this writing assignment is conventions; the writer's goal is to ultimately craft lines of "punny" dialogue that is punctuated accurately, so this lesson comes with a tool that demonstrates both Tom Swifties and dialogue punctuation.
The support trait in this assignment is word choice; requiring students to overly examine words and then pun with them can lead to a better appreciation of our complicated and marvelous language. Teaching students to find the humor in language, I believe, sets them up to more successful when learning vocabulary; kids who like words will learn more words.
This lesson is designed for teachers who want to find ways to help students really like and appreciate language. |
