Fix the Sentence: Add the Capital Letter and the End Mark

Two things are missing from every sentence on this 2nd grade capitals-punctuation page, and a dashed checklist at the top names both: Capital letter, End mark. Below it sit three cream lanes, each with a small picture of one of the animals beside a white box holding one broken sentence, printed exactly as a child would type it in a hurry: the seagulls are so big. Under each box is a three-line handwriting rule where the whole sentence is written out again, this time starting with a capital and stopping with the right mark.

None of these three sentences contains a name, which is what separates this version from its siblings. With no proper nouns to hunt for, the child has only the two ends of the sentence to think about, and the checklist can be read as a two-step routine rather than a list to remember. It is not quite as simple as adding a period every time: one of the three sentences asks a question, so the end mark still has to be chosen rather than reached for. Copying the corrected sentence in full, instead of circling the errors, is what moves the habit into the child's own writing.

Print the PDF free and have the child tick the two checklist items after each lane, then read the finished sentence back with the question mark heard rather than seen. Three lanes make this a five-minute starter or a settler after break. The choose the end mark version raises the demand to five sentences, adds names and the word I, and mixes statements with questions so the mark has to be decided every time. The unscramble the sentence pages come before this one, where the words themselves are still out of order.