Capitalization worksheets

One word to a sentence, and never the first, which is what makes this markable rather than a hunt. A sheet that lower-cases everything and asks a child to “rewrite it correctly” has as many right answers as it has readers — one child fixes four words, another fixes six, and the parent marking it has to adjudicate. Here the first letter of the sentence is already a capital, one word inside it is not, and there is one thing to point at.

Names, places and days are the three that carry nearly all the work in a primary classroom, and they are the three on this page. What is not here is the harder half — titles, the first word of speech, the “I” that is capital wherever it stands — not because they do not matter but because each of them brings a second word into the sentence that also wants a capital, and this sheet's whole promise is that there is exactly one.

The answers were not worked out by a program reading the sentences. Every sentence on this page was written down and tagged — what it is for, where it divides, which one word can be named without argument — and the questions are views of those tags. That is the only honest way to print a grammar key: a sheet that marks a defensible answer wrong teaches a child something false, which is worse than no sheet at all. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from, so the identical sheet can be had again next week.

This page is one sheet out of a family that prints five lessons. The topic is a setting rather than a different worksheet: parts of speech, subject and predicate, kinds of sentence, the mark at the end, and the word that needs a capital. Two of the five can be asked either way — circled from a list of names, or written out on a ruled line — and how many sentences and how many columns are switches beside them.

The settings travel in the link rather than on a server, so a sheet you make can be bookmarked or sent to another family as it stands — and the Name: line is printed blank, because there is nowhere in a shared link to put a child’s name. See what we don’t collect.

A sentence is only as good as its spelling, and the shelf next door prints that half: this week’s list in five shapes, sight words to trace and find, and ten pages on how words work. Word Jungle then reads the same lists aloud, which is the one thing paper cannot do — and the record book keeps track of which words a child keeps missing, so the next sheet can be exactly those.