How to Teach Kids About Punctuation

Video Transcript

"About this time you want to start introducing basic punctuation. Now the most basic punctuation is when to use upper case letters instead of lower case. There are two reasons. The first is when we start a sentence. We always start with an upper case letter. You can say capital, people have stopped using the word capital some times because they think it's confusing with capital cities but, in any case, you use a large upper case capital letter to start a sentence and when it's somebody's name, those are the two reasons to teach a child. And then from there, the second thing that you can teach is a period, how do you teach a period? It's 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, when 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 put a gallon period of milk? And they'll say no that's silly. Why is that silly? Well I didn't finish saying what I was saying and you know, try to get them to understand where a period goes. And they're going to mess up a lot for months probably and that's fine, 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, some times even second. And that's basic punctuation."