How do your students soak in new information? I love finding fun and interactive ways to help them remember their capitalization and punctuation rules. Learning new things can sometimes be daunting for kids – especially in early elementary. One of the many ways I try to help kids learn correct punctuation and capitalization is using sentence editing strips. They LOVE to read the sentence and get a chance to ‘mark’ and edit the sentence just like the teacher would!
Sentence Editing Strips
There are plenty of ways to practice capitalization and punctuation, and here’s one idea I use all the time:
Get the students to sit in a circle and split them in two groups (red and green). Then, write a sentence on the board with errors. A student from each group has a go at naming an error. If they name it correctly – they get one point (use a tally mark counter on the side of the board). If they make a mistake, they lose a point from their team, and so on. Keep going with as many sentences as you think they can handle, and give a fun incentive to the winning team! This idea can be adapted to other concepts too.
These strips are so easy to use! To prepare these, you will need:
- Laminator
- Scissors
- A copy of the sentence editing strips (below)
- A copy of uppercase letter cards (below)
- A copy of punctuation cards (below)
- Dry erase markers
- Wet wipes
Once prepared, the strips can be used over and over again. They can be placed in a plastic sleeve or envelope during literacy stations.
Before getting the students get to start editing the strips, you could go over the capitalization and punctuation rules with a poster (or draw one of your own) as a whole group.
Instruct the students to read the sentence on each strip first. They then look at all the words and letters and try to ‘fix’ the capitalization / punctuation mistakes. The strips are divided and a key ‘capitalization’ or ‘punctuation’ guide is shown on each strip.
A blank page is also included so that you could add your own sentences, or perhaps add sentences where the students can edit and fix both capitalization and punctuation mistakes.
About the Author
Yara is an ESL teacher from Sydney, Australia with a passion for making learning fun and engaging. She loves creating fun activities that children and learners can benefit from, and she shares them often on her blog, Sea of Knowledge.
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Great practice for my homeschooler! Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for your for sharing your nice ideas.. I’m so excited to use this in my remedial class. Thank you once again
Hi Jean,
We are happy to hear you will be using this in your remedial class! Have a wonderful rest of the school year! Enjoy!
Love, love, love your site! Thanks so much for sharing your freebies!
Hi Kathryn,
We are SOOOO happy to hear! Have fun!
Thank you! I was about to go into panic mode, then I found your pack!!
Thank you for sharing this. I intend to use it in my classroom as part of our language activities.
What a fun way to reinforce capitalization skills! I like the game you’ve developed here as well. Thanks so much!