The Happy Learning Den: I Believe in Capitals & Punctuation Marks

After 8 years of teaching 3rd grade, I am back in 5th. I looked forward to a refreshing change of older students. After all, they are older so they are capable of more... right? Mostly yes, but I am not seeing the quality in their writing that I expected. My students are not capitalizing the beginning of their sentences or proper nouns, and a few students don't put a capital letter in their own first name. They are writing the word "I" as "i," and forgetting to put the proper punctuation marks at the end of their sentences. It's frustrating because many of the students who are doing these things are students that I had in my class in 3rd grade! So what is a teacher to do?

Modeling
Yes. I modeled with my own writing. I modeled with student writing. I modeled by retyping a page from a book that one of the students was writing... a complete page without any punctuation marks, capital letters, or quotation marks. I had students assist me in fixing the mistakes. Still, in their own journal writing and responses to test questions they continue to make careless mistakes.

Editing
I circled many answers and fixed the errors with my pink grading pen. I sat with students and discussed .... "I forgot," "Oh yeah," and Ooooops" are the generally the first replies students make. Yet nothing changes.

I Believe
I am trying something new. Something that came to me out of the blue. I asked my students one morning if they "believe." A few responded by asking, "in what?" But most just said yes. I kept this up all day. At the end of they day I asked students what they believe in. The responses were cute and typical of 5th graders: "g-d, unicorns, magic, good grades, family, etc." Then I asked if they wanted to know what I believe in... total buy-in... they all wanted to know!

So I told them in a whisper... "I believe in putting capital letters and punctuation marks where they belong."

I told them that anyone who showed me in their writing that they believed in capital letters and proper punctuation would be called "Learning Captains." Learning Captains would be in charge of helping other students edit their writing before turning it in to me. Like magic, they all started peppering me with questions. These students want to be Learning Captains! Yes! I have buy-in!

Now I have 3 Captains in my first Math/ Science class and 2 Captains in my second Math/ Science class. My goal is to have every single student be a Learning Captain by the end of the school year. Cross your fingers for me!