New Capitalization Worksheets, Tests, and Activities Available for Free!

Learning to capitalize is a basic language arts skill that, according to CCSS, should be covered at pretty much every grade level. I've seen many educators attempt to teach this skill in many different ways. One of the worst ways that you can teach this skill is to overwhelm students. This will quickly make them feel like mastery is beyond them. Here's what this approach looks like:

A teacher comes into the classroom and has students list what words should be capitalized. This list may include things like "names of rivers," "names of planets," "names of weekdays," etc. This approach involves teaching students pretty much every type of proper noun. While some examples are surely useful, it's much more expedient and effective to just teach students what a proper noun is. Then you can tell them to capitalize proper nouns, and the list gets shorter.

When I teach students to capitalize, I teach them to capitalize these:

Teach Students to Capitalize These Words 

1. Proper Nouns (and Brand Names) 
2. Titles (except articles and prepositions [little words to the primary students]) 
3. First word in a sentence and the pronoun I

Use the power of three. Keep it simple and short. Focus on teaching them about proper nouns. That'll get them down the road.

Use These Awesome Capitalization Resources

I made a bunch of free capitalization worksheets, capitalization tests, and capitalization PowerPoint lessons. These activities can be completed online, downloaded, printed, and even re-leveled for your academic purposes. The video posted below features one of my capitalization PowerPoints. Feel free just to watch my video with your students too. Best wishes and I hope your students achieve mastery.