Where Does It End? Split Two Sentences That Have Run Together

Two sentences have been printed as one on every line of this 2nd grade capitals-punctuation page, with no full stop between them and no capital letters anywhere. Three cream lanes run down the sheet, each with a small animal picture and a white strip holding the run-on: my camel is very small the camel is in the box. Beneath each strip sit two handwriting rules rather than one, because two sentences are coming out. The dashed checklist at the top names what to look for, Capital letter, Names, End mark.

Deciding where one sentence stops is a different piece of work from restoring a mark you can already see is missing, and it is the harder of the two. Nothing on the line is wrong, exactly; there is simply too much of it, and the child has to read until the sense closes and put the boundary there. Reading aloud is what finds it, because the voice drops at the end of a sentence whether or not a full stop is printed. Having two rules underneath is a quiet form of feedback: a child who fills only the first rule has not yet split anything, and that is visible from across the room before a word is marked.

Print the PDF free and ask for each strip to be read out loud once, at normal speed, before any pencil work; the pause the child makes is the answer. Names carry a capital wherever they appear, so the middle of the second sentence is worth a second look. Fix the sentence: capital and end mark is the simpler page where each lane holds one sentence, and two sentences: full stop or question mark adds a question to the mix so the mark has to be chosen.