Are you looking for some fun and engaging punctuation resources and activities? Well, you’ve come to the right place. This blog will highlight what we think is the best of the best when it comes to engaging and hands-on punctuation activities.
Teaching Punctuation in the Early Years
Instant recognition of punctuation symbols is vital to the teaching and learning of the correct use of punctuation in reading and writing. Therefore, incorporating a variety of activities where students are given the opportunity to learn and recognise punctuation marks and their names is advised. A simple warm-up such as the teacher holding up a punctuation mark and students calling out the name is simple, yet super effective.
Also, another effective and active way to get students to engage with the names and formation of punctuation marks is punctuation ninja. Students learn a karate move for each of the punctuation marks.
Check out this video – it’s super cute!
Punctuation Resources and Activity Ideas
Sentence Sorting Activity
Encouraging students to look at already constructed sentences and working out what punctuation is missing is a fantastic small group activity. Either create your own sentences using any of our editable tray labels. Alternatively, check out one of the cutest resources we have on the website (in my opinion anyway).
Our Punctuation in a Pouch resource is a fun marsupial-themed display. The beauty of this resource is that we have already come up with 40 sentence strips ready to go! So, there’s no need for you to come up with the sentences with this super cute resource.
Contraction Folding Cards
Use this set of contraction folding cards to reinforce how contractions work with your students. This is a great interactive resource that visually shows how the two words fold in to become the one word, using the apostrophe to create the contraction. Learning contractions is a difficult concept for young minds to understand. This great hands-on resource is the perfect addition to your classroom.
To reinforce these contractions, have students write the two words and then the contraction in their book – they can then use the contraction in a sentence as well! Bravo!
Show Me Activity
It’s a quick and easy activity that can be done in the last five minutes of a session. Use our super adorable punctuation puppets for this super simple activity.
The students listen to a sentence that you read out of a book, or you can just make one up! Then, the students must decide which sentence ending is correct and hold it up. You can turn this into a game and have students that get it incorrect to sit down. The last student standing is crowned the winner!
We added this little punctuation comic poster of goodness too. Cute!
Other activity resources:
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Punctuation Scavenger Hunt
All you need for this little gem of an activity is a good storybook that includes a variety of punctuation marks.
During whole group reading, I would often cover up punctuation marks in a storybook. Next, the kids were then instructed to have a discussion about what punctuation mark would be needed at the end of each sentence. It was amazing the conversations that would occur between the students!
Sentence Shuffle Fun
A simple hands-on activity that you can set up during literacy rotations in your classroom. Create a collection of sentences with a number of punctuation options, including capital and non-capital letters. I printed each sentence on a different coloured piece of paper so that it didn’t get too confusing for the littlies. I used the editable cards from our Sentence Saga Literacy Activity (Silly Sentences) resource.
The aim of this activity is for your students to put the sentence together with the correct punctuation marks shown in the sentences. If they finish it quickly, you can instruct them to then write the correct sentence in their writing books.
Punctuation on Magnets
This is a super easy activity that you can set up and use time and time again. We found these gorgeous pastel magnets at Officeworks.
Once you have purchased these magnets, use a Sharpie to write a variety of punctuation marks on the magnets. The beauty of creating these punctuation magnets is that they can be used for a variety of activities. Here’s just one idea, use a whiteboard and have a variety of already constructed sentences that the students need to add the correct punctuation mark to the end.
Also, you could put the students into partners and have one student write a sentence with a missing punctuation mark, their partner then needs to work out what punctuation mark is missing and place the punctuation magnet on the whiteboard.
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Punctuation Displays and Posters
Creating a visual display for your students is vital to the teaching and learning of punctuation in the classroom. Our beautifully designed Punctuation Poster Pack that has been created for the early years classroom.
This poster pack is vibrant, simple and also provides examples of punctuation marks in use!
Other punctuation displays:
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Teaching PowerPoints
Use our teaching PowerPoints to help in the scaffolding of your students’ knowledge of punctuation. Our editing PowerPoints are also a great tool to gather data about where students’ punctuation knowledge currently sits.
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Punctuation Worksheets
Use our punctuation worksheets to consolidate the learning of punctuation.
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I think am going to use them to
Hi Indiana, We're glad to hear the resource will be useful! Thanks for your feedback.
I know some classes I teach they never do capital letters and full stops today I actually taught them a whole lesson on punctuation there are getting better at it
Hi Indiana, Thanks for your comment! We're glad to hear your students' use of punctuation is improving!
These are such wonderful ideas! As a casual, there are some classes that I teach where they really struggle to remember their capital letters and full stops in their writing. Thanks to this blog, I can now use some simple and effective activities to help consolidate students' knowledge and understanding of how and when to use punctuation.
Hey Natalie, thanks for your kind words. I'm so glad that you have found some of these activities to be useful ideas for you to use in the classroom.