Run-Ons

Sometimes (frequently) my day is like a run-on sentence. I taught my run-on sentence lesson today. I wrote a long run-on sentence on sentence strips and attached the strips to the wall around the room. It went about a quarter of the way around the room by the time I got it up. As part of the lesson, I read the sentence to the students without taking a breath to illustrate that punctuation, among other things, gives us a chance to breath. Afterwards, the students use sticky notes to place ending punctuation and capital letters in the correct places. Then we re-read the sentences and become aware that now we can really understand what the writer was trying to say.

As I sat down to write this at the end of the school day, I realized when I sat down that I felt exactly as I had after I read the run-on without breathing. My day with my students was a great day--fun lesson, no problems to speak of. Yet it was with a feeling of great relief that I finally had the chance to sit down! How did an ordinary day become something so busy, so jam-packed, so intense that we feel relief at the end of it? I am not talking about "thank goodness that's over" relief. I'm talking about the physical "whew, I can sit down and take a breath now" kind of relief.

When I go home every day, I change clothes and go out to work in the garden and take care of my animals. By the time I come in to prepare dinner, I am rejuvenated and have my second wind. I need to find a way to capture some of that during my school day. Maybe a screensaver from This Ordinary Day website. (Oops! That was a fragment!)