Developing punctuation using an authentic text - Ask Dr K Fisher about Animals

I’ve been asked to recommend a text that a teacher could use to develop children’s understanding and use of punctuation, beyond full stops. 

‘Ask Dr K Fisher about Animals’ by Claire Llewellyn is a great text to develop a range of punctuation marks; depending on where your punctuation focus lies, it can be used in different ways.  Obviously, when you are teaching these punctuation marks, this will be alongside teaching of the grammatical feature with which they are used.  For example commas within lists of adjectives in a noun phrase, or commas/dashes/brackets to enclose additional information, writer's comment, etc.

There are other books in the ‘Ask Dr. Fisher’ series, but in this text a teacher could explore the use of the following punctuation (page references for examples provided):

• question marks: 4, 6, 10, 12, 16, 22, 24, 28 
•  exclamation marks: 7, 8, 9, 13, 18, 19, 23, 28, 29
• commas in lists: 4, 6, 11, 12, 15, 18, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31 (not page 10 as these clauses are comma spliced, but you could make a teaching point and correct with use of semi-colons!)
• commas to demarcate clauses: 5, 6, 7, 15, 17, 19, 20 (for relative clause), 21, 22, 23, 25, 29, 30, 31 (relative clauses)
•  commas surrounding additional information/embedded clauses: 7, 11, 13, 17, 23, 25, 26, 27, 29, 31
• apostrophes for contractions: 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 18, 22, 23, 24, 28
•  hyphens: 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 27, 30, 31
•  dashes: 5, 7, 8, 9, 13, 16, 25, 29
•  brackets: 10, 13, 15, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28 (some of these used to support text structure and organisation (layout of text), rather than use within a sentence)
•  colons: 4, 13, 14 & 15 (for list), 19, 22, 28 (the colons used within sentences in the text -as opposed to those introducing a list - are excellent examples.  The information after the colon elaborates or explains the statement before.)
• apostrophes for possession: 8, 9, 29

The only punctuation I wouldn't use would be the Oxford commas before 'and', which are used occasionally in this text.  It's a comma used traditionally by printers/editors at OUP and can be used to clarify meaning in some long, complicated lists of clauses.  However, it isn't really needed in this book to clarify meaning.

I may have missed a few, but I hope there's enough here to be going on with!

To see other texts recommended on this blog, click here.  And for more Texts that Teach, check out this link.