Punctuation Celebration

By Elsa Knight Bruno and Jenny Whitehead

Can learning about punctuation really be fun? You bet--in Elsa Knight Bruno's Punctuation Celebration, featuring illlustrations by Jenny Whitehead

Punctuation marks come alive in this clever picture book featuring fourteen playful poems. Periods stop sentences in a baker's shop, commas help a train slow down, quotation marks tell people what to do, and colons stubbornly introduce lists. This appealing primer is a surefire way to make punctuation both accessible and fun for kids.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jul 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781466821897

Elsa Knight Bruno

ELSA KNIGHT BRUNO taught kindergarten for twenty-nine years. She has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in many children’s magazines. Punctuation Celebration is her first picture book. She lives in Sylvania, Ohio.

Book preview

[Sydney · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What an entertaining (and slightly nerdy) book! The rhymes were fun, and it was educational without feeling like it.

[dms02 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Cute poems to illustrate the use of common punctuation.

[ginabayne · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is an informational book on punctuation. It goes through when and how to use them. It does this through poetry and illustrations. The poem's rhyme scheme is inconsistent.

The book does a great job in visually showing which punctuation is being focused on. For example, the punctuation being focused on is a different font color than the rest of the text. This makes it easy to understand which type of punctuation is discussed at the time. In "Tomorrow's my birthday; I'm going to be seven", the semicolon is red while the rest of the text is black.

Another example of how the punctuation is emphasized is through the illustrations. The illustrations incorporate the punctuation. For example, to express "parentheses", there are parentheses used throughout the illustrations. Parentheses are used as a symbol on a chocolate milk bottle, is shown through the arrangement of the falling potato chips, and a part of the design on a sub sandwich's bread.

The big message of this picture book is to inform readers of the different types of punctuation.

[amykgrey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is a great way to introduce/reinforce conventions with young students. This book would be great for students under third grade. I would use it as a mentor text to a mini-lesson on conventions. The rhymes would also be great to print up and display in the classroom for students to reference during writing times.

[mburgess_58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Punctuation is a very important thing that children learn. I think the author did a good job presenting the information in this book. It was very interesting to read.

[debnance_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Very clever short poems about punctuation marks. All are quite clever, possibly too clever for kids. Must test a few of these out.