Looking for Year 1 Punctuation worksheets to help your child practise their skills?
As a tutor with 200+ hours of experience working with various age levels, I’ve seen how much hands-on activities can help students retain new concepts more effectively.
This article offers a breakdown of the curriculum, free worksheets and teaching tips for parents! Scroll to get started 💪
What punctuation is taught in Year 1?
How do you teach punctuation in a fun way?
Download our Year 1 Punctuation Worksheets
What punctuation is taught in Year 1?
As your child enters Year 1, they’ll have a foundational understanding of punctuation through the use of full stops and capital letters.
The Year 1 English curriculum aims to further your child’s understanding of how punctuation shapes meaning in sentences and signals different types of statements. The focus is on developing confidence in recognising and applying punctuation in their writing.
1️⃣ According to the curriculum, students at this stage “use simple sentences, correct sentence boundary punctuation and capital letters for proper nouns,” reinforcing their grasp of sentence structure.
2️⃣ They also develop an understanding of the role of question marks and exclamation points in written expression being to “make statements, ask questions, express emotion or give commands.”
3️⃣ These skills are applied as students “create short imaginative, informative and persuasive written and/or multimodal texts to show emerging use of appropriate text structure, sentence level grammar, word choice, spelling and punctuation.”
Our worksheets aim to help students practise using these key types of punctuation that are covered in Year 1:
Boundary Punctuation
Boundary punctuation is the use of capital letters and full stops to indicate separate sentences. As well as starting sentences, capital letters are used to indicate proper nouns such as the names of people, places or organisations – for example, John, Sydney, Hungry Jack’s.
Question and Exclamation Marks
Question marks are a way of expressing curiosity or confusion and exclamation marks are used to express excitement, surprise or anger.
How do you teach punctuation in a fun way?
Here are three fun tips I’ve used as an English tutor to help young learners grasp punctuation concepts by making learning more interactive:
- Punctuation Treasure Hunt – Give students a short passage with missing punctuation and have them search for the right spots to place full stops, commas and question marks. You can make it hands-on by using stickers or coloured markers.
- Act It Out – Turn punctuation marks into actions! For example, a full stop means “freeze,” a comma means “slow down” and an exclamation mark means “jump!” This helps kids understand how punctuation affects sentence flow.
- Punctuation Art Gallery – Turn punctuation marks into characters or symbols that students can draw or decorate. For example, a full stop can be a stop sign, an exclamation mark can be a firework and a question mark can be a magnifying glass. After creating their drawing, the student can write a sentence that incorporates their chosen punctuation mark.
Download our Year 1 Punctuation Worksheets
We’ve come up with 5 Year 1 punctuation worksheets to help your child develop their literacy skills, which you can download for FREE below!
Searching for punctuation worksheets for different year groups?
If you have a child in another year group, don’t stress! We’ve also got sheets just for them that you can download for FREE — have a look:
Kindergarten | Year 2 | Year 3 | Year 4 | Year 5 | Year 6
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Christina Ugov is currently completing a double degree in International and Global Studies and Theatre and Performance at the University of Sydney. Outside of her studies, she enjoys exploring creative writing projects, analysing literature and playing with her cat. She spends her spare time reading, listening to music and drinking lots of tea.
Jessica Loch is a K-6 English Resource Designer at Art of Smart in her second year at the University of Sydney studying Primary Education. She is passionate about learning and helping young students to grow and improve.
