Learning outcomes

Capital letters for names and for the personal pronoun.

2	Use of capital letters, full stops, question marks and exclamation marks to demarcate sentences Commas to separate items in a list Apostrophes to mark where letters are missing in spelling and to mark singular possession in nouns [for example, the girl’s name]
3	Introduction to inverted commas to punctuate direct speech.
4	Use of inverted commas and other punctuation to indicate direct speech [for example, a comma after the reporting clause; end punctuation within inverted commas: The conductor shouted, “Sit down!”] Apostrophes to mark plural possession [for example, the girl’s name, the girls’ names] Use of commas after fronted adverbials
5	Brackets, dashes or commas to indicate parenthesis. Use of commas to clarify meaning or avoid ambiguity.
6	Use of the semi-colon, colon and dash to mark the boundary between independent clauses [for example, It’s raining; I’m fed up] Use of the colon to introduce a list and use of semi-colons within lists Punctuation of bullet points to list information How hyphens can be used to avoid ambiguity [for example, man eating shark versus man-eating shark, or recover versus re-cover]

Teaching punctuation – what primary teachers need to know
Full stops and question marks
The most basic concept in punctuation is the sentence. Kress (1982) reminds us that this is a key element of learning to write, but, as we have seen, this is not the basic unit in which children – or most adults – speak.
If you have taught at Key Stage 1, you may frequently have come across children putting a capital letter at the beginning of every ‘sentence’, but a full stop at the end of every line. As we have seen from Hall (2001), the basic relationship between punctuation and the structure of written language is not yet clear to them. This practice also mirrors some of the texts young learners read, comprising short sentences and just one line to a page. Even towards the end of Key Stage 2, you may find children who are still struggling with demarcating sentences correctly. We recently came across a Year 5 writer who had been set a target for his writing: ‘Remember capital letters and full stops’. He was a keen writer and when he had the opportunity, he would write pages of rushed narrative packed full of action, but with no punctuation. He had kept the same target for the whole of Year 4. Not only was this enormously dispiriting, but it was also likely to remain the case throughout Year 5 unless something significant happened to change the situation.
The case study below shows how one teacher used a novel approach to encourage her class to focus on the functions of punctuation marks.