Review: The Cozy Punctuation Course
Okay. Swallow hard. Here’s a course on basic punctuation that your 6th through 12th graders could actually like! Let retired school teacher Marie Rackham take you to beautiful scenic spots – like a lighthouse, forest, shoreline, Native totem poles, and a waterfall – to make question marks, double quotation marks, and capitals more palatable. Really!
Splashes from the River Multimedia Entertainment brings you Rackham’s The Basic Cozy Punctuation Course, and it delivers! Here, find 14 lessons broken up over 178 minutes on video, plus intro and conclusion, to go with your online workbook. The course – shot on location in beautiful British Columbia – includes 52 tracks of classical music woven into the assignments along with poems and highlighted graphics, thereby interesting and holding the attention of your audio learner, your visual learner, and your hands-on, workbook-doing learner in tutorials ranging from 7 to 18 minutes each.
Great for ESL, classrooms, corporate seminars, and homeschoolers, The Basic Cozy Punctuation Course will make you giggle, fill your eyes and ears with beauty, and cause you to learn or re-learn/remediate the elasticity of punctuation. What? I said “elasticity”? That’s right, for Rackham notes the evolution of punctuation (invented by publishers) and the introduction of new marks as well as new uses and popularity for old marks. [No, Marie; I had never heard of `interrobang’ before, and neither had my spell-check program!] Thankfully, she includes an answer key to help the teachers navigate the treachery of changing commas, slashes and dashes, and periods that have a “to be, or not to be” sense of humor.
This “living textbook” not only challenges, but encourages. The company’s very mission statement makes you want to -uh- dive right in: “Creating original, rehydrating material for questers who get thirsty while wandering and wondering through the backwoods of their imaginations.” The grandmotherly-looking veteran teacher is warm and hospitable, inviting you into her home and along for an educational ride in her trusty Camino. Excellent!
