Capital Letters and Full Stops

We have been reading lots of books and Kai also noticed the sentences in books beginning with capital letters and end with full stops. Kai has started to write and he loves writing to his friends, replying emails and writing short stories.

I thought it was a good time to start teaching him the basic punctuation rules and allowed him more time to sink into him. We talked about why we need to put a full stop behind and he requested to read more books. And usually we can read like 4 to 10 books in a go and he would still pick them up to read and look through them when I am busy in the kitchen. So this time we read a couple of books with different themes and Kai pointed out to me that each sentence begins with capital letter and ends with a full stop. And he also noticed the speeches in the stories as well as questions in stories.

After Kai have mastered our objectives of learning for this lesson, I let Kai worked on a editing worksheet with 5 sentences and he was given a blue colour pencil to highlight the part he changes.

The couple of books we read together

1. Little Platypus (Theme: Finding identity)
2. If I would (Theme: A mother's love)
3. The Sound of the Sea (Theme: The impact of death of a loved one.)
4. Plants have leaves (Theme: Living things-Plants)


Click to see Kai's work

Rewrite the sentences.

kookaburra likes to sing.
Kookaburra likes to sing.

koala loves to chew the leaves of gum trees.
Koala loves to chew the leaves of gum tress.

daddy goes for his running training this evening
Daddy goes for his running training this evening.

mummy is going to cook Vietnamese rice roll for dinner
Mummy is going to cook Vietnamese rice roll for dinner.

kai loves to fix and play with Lego sets
Kai loves to fix and play with Lego sets.

uncle eng wah is coming to visit me in December
Uncle Eng Wah is coming to visit me in December.

my grandma and uncle are going to buy me a big Lego set for Christmas.
My grandma and uncle are going to buy me a big Lego set for Christmas.

time for a break now
Time for a break now.

After checking through Kai's work, I asked him what he must remember for this lesson and one thing that I have noticed that Kai remembers that names begins with capital letters.

Remember a sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop.

More reading...

Kai has requested that we do not do much work for English today instead to read through what we have learnt for the past few lessons. To revisit, recap and to master them before moving on.

We spent the time, reading through what we have learnt, forming sentences, spotting and changing the casing for names to capital letter and looking at personal pronoun "I".

It was also a time that I could see how much Kai has learnt and I would say that we have progressed.

We spent the time looking through more books from the library and enjoyed ourselves reading.

Pronoun "I"

I introduced Kai to the Personal Pronoun "I". It is the easy to start with since he understood the usage of I. I taught him that when using I, in a sentence, no matter where it is, it has to be written in the capital letter.

We made some sentences with I and he was able to move on to a couple more of other personal pronouns like he, she, you, we, they and it.

Here's the sentences that Kai made up,

I am Kai and I will be 5 years old soon.

When I was little, I drank more milk than now.

When my maternal grandma and uncle come to visit in December, I want to bring them around Sydney.


Other sentences that he made with the other pronouns,

Alex and Emma were at the playground, they enjoyed playing there.

Bobby, the dog, loves to bark whenever I walk past it and it will stop once Uncle David calls its name.

English Grammar and Punctuation

We are still looking at "Nouns". We focused on "Proper Nouns" and I explain to Kai that it refers to a specific person, place or object. And when we use a proper noun, we write the beginning letter in capital letter (upper case) no matter where it occurs in a sentence.

We discussed further about Proper Nouns and form some sentences using proper nouns.

Kai went to Three Bears Preschool in Vancouver and Calvary Pandan Kindergarten in Singapore.

I love to read books written by Eric Carle.

Grandpa William stayed in Mount Alvernia Hospital and Tan Tock Seng Hospital when he was sick.

We went to Sydney Downtown last weekend.

My parents brought me to Paddy Market in Chinatown near to Central Station.

* Focus on Proper Nouns and Punctation (Capital letter used for proper nouns.)