The note
How schools teach it now
KS2 covers capital letters, full stops, question and exclamation marks, commas in lists and after fronted adverbials, apostrophes, and inverted commas for speech. Years 5–6 add brackets, dashes, colons, semicolons and hyphens. All of these appear in the Year 6 SPaG (grammar, punctuation and spelling) test.
5-minute kitchen-table activity
Copy two sentences from a cereal box or comic, leaving out all the capitals and punctuation. Your child puts them back in with a pencil, saying why each one is needed ('capital because it's a name'). Compare with the original, then let them set one for you.
Worked example
Find the section with a punctuation mistake, or choose N for no mistake. A: On saturday morning, / B: Mum took us / C: to the market / D: in the town centre.
- Check capital letters first: the start of the sentence, names, days, months and places.
- Then check the end mark and any commas or apostrophes.
- 'saturday' is a day of the week, so it needs a capital S.
Answer: A (it should be 'Saturday')
Common mistakes to watch for
- Forgetting that capital letters count as punctuation in these questions.
- Putting an apostrophe in a plain plural, like 'apple's for sale'.
- Marking a section wrong because they'd punctuate it differently, though it's still correct.
Encouragement
- Try saying
- “Let's check each mark one at a time, like detectives.”
- Rather than
- “How could you miss a full stop?”