Beginning Punctuation in Tutoring or Homeschooling

"About this time you'll want to start introducing basic punctuation. Now, the most basic punctuation is when to use uppercase letters instead of lowercase. There are two reasons. The first is when we start a sentence, we always start with an uppercase letter. You can say capital, people stopped using the word capital sometimes because they think it gets confusing with capitol cities. But in any case you use a large uppercase capital letter to start a sentence. And when it's somebody's name. Those are the two reasons to teach a child. Then from there the second thing that you can teach is a period. How you teach a period is difficult but teach a child when they're talking to try to put a period where they think the thought would end or if they're telling a story where they would pause. I went to the store. (pause) Then I bought a gallon of milk. (pause) And play around with them, say would I put then I bought a gallon period of milk? They'll say no, that's silly. Why is that silly? Well I didn't finish saying what I was saying and try to get them to understand where a period goes. They're going to mess up a lot for months probably and that's fine, I mean as long as they start to get the idea. The other three types that you can introduce still at this level are exclamation point which is very fun because it means somebody is excited or they are loud for some reason. And question mark which is obvious because it was a question. After those are mastered, and those are the fun ones, they love the exclamation point and the question mark, you can get into talking and how we put quotation marks around the words that someone actually says. You don't have to go to quotation marks right away, that's a little further down the road, almost never introduced until first grade, sometimes even second. And that's basic punctuation."