Astounded Apostrophe

I had a pretty memorable experience yesterday at school.

About a week ago, I taught some punctuation lessons. I focused one entire day to the apostrophe. I taught the kids the 4 major rules to apostrophe uses, and tried with all my knowledge to make that subject exciting to 13 and 14 year olds who really are only interested in members of the opposite sex.

In my perusal of an exciting apostrophe activity, I ran across a website that really sounded too good to be true. The Apostrophe Protection society devotes a whole web site to the protection of correct usage of the apostrophe. Part of the website are pages and pages of examples of the misuse of the apostrophe. Business signs, menu's, and many other images are shown using an apostrophe where one is not needed, and the absence of the apostrophe where one should be. I must be honest and say that I had myself a loud chuckle at this.

At the time, I thought that I would be the only one in my classroom to be amused by this, but turns out, most students got quite a kick to the fact that many business professionals have misused the apostrophe.

I had the students look at examples of these misused signs and they were to correct the errors. After learning the rules, most students did well at identifying where the sign had gone wrong.

If you click the link above and look at the examples, you will see my most favorite mistake: Bob,s Pets.(Yup, that's a comma, the cousin to the apostrophe). Apparently Bob, bless his heart, knew some sort of punctuation mark should be included but wasn't certain which one. We'll forgive you this once, Bob.

Yesterday, I saw the wondrous effects of this activity when one student came in to see me before school started.

This student, one whom I consider above most 8th graders, came excitedly into the room and proudly exclaimed, "Mrs. Hubert! I have to show you something!" He then proceeded to get out his cell phone (yup, even tiny 8th graders have cell phones). He then explained, "Do you remember that apostrophe thing we did? Well, last night at Wal*Mart I saw a misuse of the apostrophe so I took a picture with my cell camera."

I was ecstatic! If I had power to give extra credit, he surely would have received some.

As he showed me the picture, it displayed a sign written in ginormous letters that read: You're Chance to win BIG!

Look over that and see if you can identify the error.

Let me explain. An apostrophe is used in contractions (can't, don't). In the above example, the sign really says: You are Chance to win Big! Silly Wal*Mart bigwigs don't even know how to use the apostrophe.

The fact that my student remembered and had the picture proof seriously made my day.

I feel so proud.

On Spring Break for a whole week! YAY!

Love you all.