How to teach… punctuation

The ability to punctuate correctly will help your students avoid embarrassing pitfalls. Photograph: Jamie Carstairs/Alamy

It can be a heartbreaking experience for teachers when students present them with a page of writing which could be brilliant, if only it were punctuated correctly.

These resources offer a ray of hope in the battle to help children cut the chaos in their writing and translate the gems inside their head from a jumbled mess to perfectly manicured prose.

First get your students’ attention with some exciting and catchy tunes from the studio of Mr A, Mr C and Mr D Present, three full-time teachers who write educational songs that pack a punch. Punctuation nation is a classic sing-a-long explaining the use of question marks, exclamation marks and even the impressive ellipsis – you’ll also need the lyrics.

Many children (and adults) find using apostrophes tricky. Learn how to teach them the fun way with the apostrophe song and accompanying lyrics.

Last year Mr D (aka Matthew Dix) wrote the catchy Grammar Dance to help his year 6 students get through their spelling, punctuation and grammar (Spag) tests. Here are the lyrics to learn with your class. If you want to practise for the Spag test, check out this set of questions.

Thanks to teacher Joseph Donovan for sharing his succinct punctuation card. It’s a handy guide to the big 12, including: the full stop, comma, apostrophe, semicolon, exclamation mark, dash, brackets, hyphen, ellipsis, colon, question mark and quotation mark.

Who says having a little play with punctuation can’t be tremendous fun? Cheers to the team at primaryclass.co.uk for this punctuation “I have… who has?…” follow-me style activity and punctuation bingo. Primary teacher and children’s author, Mike Davies, has also shared an amusing activity on punctuating speech using an extract of his book, Lousy Thinking.

Teaching year 1? There’s no better time to get started on your punctuation adventure. This interactive activity on the full stop does a great job of demonstrating the point of this most masterful of punctuation marks. This lesson on reading aloud helps young students to discover the point of punctuation, while Speech marks is a great introduction for year 2 students.

For key stage 2 students, Using punctuation is a really useful interactive and further punctuation-mark practice exercises can be found for semicolons, colons, hyphens and dashes and commas.

Some key stage 3 students still struggle with punctuation, so check out Punctuation for meaning, which neatly explains why it’s needed. The interactive activity will help students use punctuation correctly, particularly at boundaries between sentences and clauses. There’s more advice in Why do we punctuate?, which looks at commas, brackets, inverted commas, the apostrophe, colons and semicolons, hyphens and dashes.

For key stage 4 students who need to brush up, find Grammar trouble spots.

Special educational needs (SEN) specialist Matt Grant, who blogs at HumansNotRobots, has shared a lovely set of resources designed to help SEN students develop basic literacy skills, including punctuation. Find English skillsbuilder guidance for an introduction to the series, then check out stage one, stage two and stage three. There are some great ideas for punctuation activities in the booklets.

Cover your classroom in commas with this punctuation display banner from Twinkl, and check out this poster. It can be frustrating for teachers when students do know how to use punctuation, but fail to check their work. This Keep calm and check your punctution poster is the perfect reminder. The Punctuation pyramid makes another great display to help children with their independent writing.

Filling in the gaps on this Missing punctuation resource is a great way to hammer home the message further.

And finally for teachers wishing to test the strength of their own punctuation skills, do take our Grammar and punctuation quiz.

How to teach… punctuation