Is the following punctuated correctly?When the children picked up the pointy and thorny nailed boards; the parent screamed loudly; this made the children cry.

No, the sentence is not punctuated correctly. Here's the corrected version: "When the children picked up the pointy and thorny nailed boards, the parent screamed loudly. This made the children cry."

In the original sentence, semicolons were used incorrectly. Semicolons are used to connect two independent clauses that are closely related in thought. In this case, "When the children picked up the pointy and thorny nailed boards" is a dependent clause, so a comma should be used instead. The second semicolon was also used incorrectly because "This made the children cry" is a new sentence related to the previous one, so it should be