English · Capital letters for names and sentence openings
Capital Toggle
Tap any word to switch its capital letter on or off. Capitals go on the first word and on the words that name one particular person, place, day or month, and nowhere else.
Free to use and free to share. There is no sign-up, no score, and nothing a child does here is recorded or sent anywhere. What you may do with it, in full.
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Why this works
The finished sentence is "The science teacher lives near Snowdon in Wales." A capital letter does two jobs and only two. It shows where a sentence starts, which is why "The" takes one whatever kind of word it is. And it marks a PROPER NOUN: the name of one particular person, place, day or month, of which there is only one being talked about. That is why "Snowdon", "Wales" take a capital wherever it appears in a sentence. Everything else stays small, and the words that catch people out are the ones that feel important: "science", "teacher". "science" feels important, but it names a kind of thing rather than one particular person, place, day or month, so it stays small. Putting a capital where one is not wanted is exactly as wrong as leaving one out, which is why this board scores both the same way.
Helping a child through Capital Toggle
Hints, least revealing first
- Read it aloud and ask of each word: does this name ONE particular thing, or a kind of thing there are lots of?
- Watch "science": it is the sort of word that gets a capital by accident. "science" feels important, but it names a kind of thing rather than one particular person, place, day or month, so it stays small.
- Apart from the opening word, 2 words in this sentence name something particular. Everything else stays small, however important it feels.
When they finish it: “Every capital exactly where it belongs, and nowhere else.”
11+ skill this exercise practises
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Capital Toggle practises one skill. English has 41 of them
A free diagnostic covers every english skill and the other three subjects, and comes back with a shortlist rather than a list.