Apply capital letters to sentence starts and proper nouns.
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
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.
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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.
Which words take a capital letter
Read the sentence and work out why each capital letter in the gap is there.
Every choice has the same letters in the same order - only the capitals change.
The prize was presented to … by the head teacher.
Choices for the gap: marek brennan, Marek brennan, marek Brennan, Marek Brennan.
Answer: Marek Brennan
How you get there
Both words in the gap need a capital letter because a person's first name and family name are both proper nouns, so "Marek Brennan" is the only complete version; "Marek brennan" and "marek Brennan" each capitalise one word and leave the other with a small letter.
Why the other answers tempt
A capital letter always needs a reason - an important-looking word that names no particular person, place, day or country keeps its small letter.
If they are stuck, say this
There is no sentence opening to help you here, so judge each word on its own: a name that belongs to one particular person takes a capital wherever it sits in the sentence.
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.
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.
What to say if they get stuck
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.
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.
Apply capital letters to sentence starts and proper nouns. 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 always needs a reason - an important-looking word that names no particular person, place, day or country keeps its small letter. 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. There is no sentence opening to help you here, so judge each word on its own: a name that belongs to one particular person takes a capital wherever it sits in the sentence.
The skill map draws the line here: Excludes internal sentence punctuation and stylistic capitalisation. 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 capital letters are mark possession, mark a sentence boundary and use a colon. Each has its own exercise and its own link, and none of them needs an account.
Use Capital Toggle, embedded on this page. It is the exercise the skill map attaches to use capital letters, 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.
