You’ve heard of Little Red Riding Hood – now meet her cousin, Ruby Red, who makes the same journey through the forest to visit her granny. However, Ruby Red’s story takes a strange turn when she also meets a wolf in the forest. In grave danger, lost in the dark forest and sick from eating poisonous berries, Ruby learns the importance of listening to her parents, keeping her promises and not judging everyone by the actions of one member of a group.
Join Ruby on her journey as she writes the story of her meeting with the wolf and as she learns with the assistance of the wolf and Punctua, the Fairy Godmother of Writing, to punctuate properly and become a bestselling author.
Descriptosaurus Punctuation in Action Year 3: Ruby Red is part of a short series of age-specific, beautifully illustrated stories that can be read for pleasure and/or used as a contextualised resource, containing a step-by-step guide to teaching punctuation. The characters from each story are used to demonstrate a range of punctuation rules in a fun and engaging way appropriate to the book’s age group. Areas covered include:
- formulating punctuation rules.
- the use of misconceptions to highlight common errors.
- teaching tips to provide a punctuation model.
The book explores the impact of punctuation on reading, understanding, meaning and effect, and can be used as a basis for pupils’ own punctuation or included in their ‘Writer’s Toolkit.’ These new Descriptosaurus stories are an indispensable teaching aid for making punctuation fun for all primary teachers and literacy coordinators.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART A – THE STORY OF RUBY RED
CHAPTER 1 Ruby Red
CHAPTER 2 The Forest
CHAPTER 3 The Berries
CHAPTER 4 The Wolf
PART B – LEARNING PUNCTUATION WITH THE CHARACTERS
CHAPTER 5 Meet the Characters
Section 1: Ruby
Section 2: Mr. Wolf (Lord of Lupus Forest)
Section 3: Punctua (Fairy Godmother of Writing)
CHAPTER 6 Editing a Story
Section 1: Writing and Editing Tips
Section 2: Sentences
Section 3: Comma Splicing
CHAPTER 7 Capital Letters
Section 1: Beginning of a sentence/names of people
Section 2: Names of places
Section 3: Days of the Week & Months of the Year
Section 4: Capital Letters Editing Checklist
CHAPTER 8 Question Marks
CHAPTER 9 Exclamation Marks
CHAPTER 10 Inverted Commas (Speech Marks)
Section 1: When and How to Use
Section 2: How to punctuate inside the Speech Marks
CHAPTER 11 Apostrophes
Section 1: Possession
Section 2: Plural nouns ending in ‘s’
Section 3: Singular nouns ending in ‘s’
Section 4: Contraction/missing letters
Section 5: It’s/its; they’re/ their; you’re/your
Section 6: Editing Checklist
CHAPTER 12 Commas
Section 1: Commas in a list
Section 2: To make the meaning clear
Section 3: To separate parts of a sentence
APPENDIX:
Checklist: Ruby’s Editing Checklist – Level 1
Checklist: Ruby’s Editing Checklist – Level 2
Lord Lupus’ Challenge: Correct the errors in the passage
Certificate: Editing Level 1
Certificate: Editing Level 2
Biography
Alison Wilcox is the author of the Descriptosaurus series and has worked as a primary school teacher for many years. Whilst teaching, she developed Descriptosaurus to scaffold and improve children’s creative writing, with dramatic results, and she made the decision to give up full-time teaching to work on the Descriptosaurus series. To keep up to date with current practices in schools, Alison undertakes brief teaching assignments, works with schools to develop new resources and conducts workshops for schools and teaching alliances.
