Place a colon between a complete lead-in and its explanation or list.
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.
Practise it now
Three marks are missing. Pick one from the tray, then tap the hole it belongs in.
This exercise practises use a colon alongside its own main skill, Punctuation.
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A worked example
One question of the kind this skill is tested with, worked all the way through: the reasoning, and what the wrong answers are there to catch.
Worked example: Colon or full stop?
Worked example: Which sentence is punctuated correctly?
The last coach left without us, Kofi rang home from the box.
The last coach left without us. Kofi rang home from the box.
The last coach left without us Kofi rang home from the box.
The last coach left without us: Kofi rang home from the box.
Answer: The last coach left without us. Kofi rang home from the box.
How you get there
"Kofi rang home from the box" stands up on its own: it has its own subject and its own verb, so it is a second sentence rather than the thing the first half promised. That means an ordinary full stop, not a colon. The colon version is wrong because "Kofi rang home from the box" is a whole sentence with its own subject and verb, so it is not the thing "The last coach left without us" was promising.
Why the other answers tempt
A capital letter after the mark is no help at all here: every second half starts with a name, so it looks the same either way.
If they are stuck, say this
Read the second half on its own. If it could stand as a sentence, the two halves are separate; if it cannot, the first half was promising it.
Three marks are missing. Pick one from the tray, then tap the hole it belongs in.
This engine’s own main skill is Punctuation. It practises use a colon alongside it.
Punctuation is the writing down of your voice. Read "Slow down Ben you will trip" aloud and you will hear two small pauses and one urgent ending. When you speak straight to somebody by name, that name gets a comma on each side to fence it off from the rest, which is why Ben needs one before and one after: without them, "Slow down Ben" sounds like Ben is the thing being slowed down. The ending is chosen by tone, and a warning shouted at somebody about to fall takes an exclamation mark rather than a full stop. Say the sentence, mark the pauses, then choose the ending that matches the feeling.
What to say if they get stuck
Read it out loud. Every place your voice pauses is a hole that wants a comma.
Ben is being spoken to, not talked about. A name you are addressing gets fenced off on both sides.
The last hole ends the whole thing. Is this a calm statement or a shout of warning?
The same exercise practises several skills, and telling them apart is often the difficulty rather than the exercise itself. On this page the skill is: place a colon between a complete lead-in and its explanation or list, and it stops where the text before the colon must stand as a complete clause.
Answered from what the skill map records about this skill, not from a template. Every answer here is on the page, and the same questions are the page's FAQ structured data.
Place a colon between a complete lead-in and its explanation or list. It is one of 41 named English skills in the 11+, in the punctuation strand, and this page carries 1 interactive exercise that practises it.
A capital letter after the mark is no help at all here: every second half starts with a name, so it looks the same either way. The wrong answers on this skill are built out of that, not out of random numbers, so it is worth naming out loud before your child meets it under time pressure.
Point at the next move rather than explaining the whole rule. Read the second half on its own. If it could stand as a sentence, the two halves are separate; if it cannot, the first half was promising it.
The skill map draws the line here: The text before the colon must stand as a complete clause. A question past that line is testing a different named English skill, which is worth knowing before you spend a week practising the wrong one.
The punctuation strand holds 9 skills that are tested together, and the pages next to use a colon are punctuate direct address, punctuate direct speech and punctuate a fronted adverbial. Each has its own exercise and its own link, and none of them needs an account.
Use Punctuation Pinball, embedded on this page. It is the exercise the skill map attaches to use a colon, it runs in the browser with no account to make, nothing is scored, and nothing a child does here is recorded or sent anywhere. It also has its own link, so you can send it to a child without sending them anywhere else first.
Comprehension, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation are four different problems
A free diagnostic separates them, so practice goes where the gap actually is rather than on whichever one is easiest to set.
