Sometimes eliminating a comma from its rightful position in a sentence creates downright humorous phrases that will appeal to elementary and middle school students. Write some examples of this on the board. For instance, “Rachel enjoys cooking her family and dogs”; “Let’s eat Grandma”; and this unfortunate phrase from a list of medical symptoms: “headache unable to eat diarrhea.” Ask students to make up their own silly and comma-less sentences; write them on a poster and illustrate. Hang up the posters to demonstrate the woes of incorrect punctuation.
Comma splices are formed when two independent clauses are incorrectly joined with only a comma. Show middle and high school students an example of this in classic literature. Charles Dickens begins his novel “A Tale of Two Cities” with an extremely long run-on sentence full of comma splices. Have the students read the paragraph out loud and create their own description (complete with comma splices) of today's “best of times” and “worst of times.” Have them exchange papers with a classmate and restructure each other’s sentences for correct grammar.
Elementary school students will enjoy this multi-sensory activity. On large strips cut from colorful poster board, write sentences about pasta, leaving out all necessary commas. Provide students with glue sticks and elbow macaroni, and tell them to glue the macaroni commas in the correct places in the sentences. Use the strips on a bulletin board labeled “Punctuating With Pasta.” To expand the lesson, use different pasta for different punctuation marks, such as broken linguine and orzo for an exclamation mark, fusilli for parentheses,
Middle and high school students will benefit from exposure to commas in context. Create a bulletin board with the heading “Commas in Context.” Divide the board into sections, writing the comma rules across the top of each section. Have students search newspapers and magazines for sentences containing commas, and copy them in large letters on colorful squares and rectangles cut from cardstock. Include the name of the article, the author and the publication. Have students hang their quotes on the bulletin board under the corresponding comma rule.