Punctuation Practice Worksheet

Rewrite the sentence, correctly punctuated

Each row prints a sentence stripped of every capital letter and every mark: where are you going. The child rewrites it properly on the line beneath.

Five to ten problems a sheet, taken from a bank of fourteen and shuffled each time. The answer key prints on its own page.

What the sentences cover

• Sentence ends — full stop, question mark or exclamation mark.
• Capital letters at the start of the sentence, and on proper nouns of three kinds: Sarah, Paris, Saturdays.
• Commas after an opening clause. "After dinner, we watched a film."
• Apostrophes in contractions, where cant has to become can't and the child has to work out which letter the mark is standing in for.
• Speech marks, including the comma that goes before them: Lucy said, "I love books."

Stripping the capitals is the part that makes it work

Most punctuation worksheets leave the capital letters in place and ask only for the marks. That is a much easier task, because the capital tells you where the sentence starts and often what kind of word each one is.

Removing them means the child has to identify the sentence boundary and the proper nouns for themselves, which is where the real errors live. Plenty of children who can place a full stop reliably will still write "i" and "paris".

How to mark it

One mark per element rather than one mark per sentence.

A sentence with the right question mark and a missing capital is not a failure. Scoring it as one hides which rule went missing. Mark the elements separately and a page of eight sentences becomes a fairly precise diagnostic. Within a minute you can normally see whether the gap is sentence ends, or capitals, or the comma rule, or apostrophes — and those want four different lessons.

The apostrophe is the one that will not stick

Expect it back. Contractions are learned quickly enough. The trouble is that the same mark also does possession, and the two rules collide the moment a child meets its beside it's.

This sheet stays on contractions deliberately. Mixing possession in before contractions are automatic tends to produce a child who sprinkles apostrophes wherever an s appears, which is harder to undo than never having taught it.

What you set

Problem count from 5 to 10, a worksheet title, a rewritable instruction line, optional Name and Date fields, and the answer key toggle. A4 or US Letter.

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