Starting Big, Ending Right

Once a sentence is a whole idea, it needs two small signals that tell a reader where it starts and stops: a capital letter at the beginning, and the right punctuation mark at the end. Little as they seem, these are exactly the marks a beginning reader leans on to know where one thought ends and the next begins.

Try this: write a sentence together, out loud, one word at a time, and ask your child which letter should be "tall" — the first one. Then read the sentence back and ask how your voice should sound at the end — loud and excited, curious, or just finished — and match that to a period, question mark, or exclamation point.

A fun way to practice: read a few sentences out loud in a flat voice and ask your child to guess the end mark just from listening, then check by looking at the page together. Getting it by ear first, before naming the marks, is exactly the order most kids actually learn it in.