Capital letters. If you’ve taught young writers for very long, you know that these letters have a way of popping up uninvited, randomly placed in the middle of words or sentences. Sometimes, capital letters are forgotten at the beginning of sentences of people’s names.
Not to fret. When kids are using conventions, like capital letters, incorrectly in their writing, I believe they just need more guidance and direction on how to use them. So, I cooked up a fun acronym {like I did with our SCOOPS retelling chart} to help my own kids remember when to use capital letters.
Today, I’m sharing it with you for free. Look for the teal, oval button towards the bottom of this post and click on it for the free download!
Capital Letters Organizer for Young Writers
The organizer is pretty much self-explanatory. I believe it’s a good reference for young writers while they write, but especially when they edit their work.
One of the things that my editing checklist encourages kids to do is look to see if capital letters are in their correct spots. Well, if kids don’t know where the correct spots are for capital letters, it makes is difficult to carry out that task! That’s where CHIPS comes into play.
CHIPS helps kids remember that capital letters should be used for:
- C- Calendar Words – days of the week or months of the year
- H– Holiday Words – Christmas, St. Valentine’s Day, or Earth Day
- I– I by itself
- P– Names of People, Pets, or Places
- S– Beginning of a Sentence
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CUPS- Editing Checklist for Young Writers
~Becky
Holly Edwards says
January 21, 2016 at 8:24 amHi!! I love receiving your emails and checking out your ideas. My 7 yr old son has a reading comprehension disorder and is finding it really hard to get the basics. He is now accommodated in school but it takes a lot of time at home as well to keep up. Thanks so much for your great ideas!! I am going to start trying the Capital letters teaching now to see if he will remember using CHIPS 🙂
nortonspeech says
April 5, 2017 at 1:22 pmI love the capitalization visual. Thank yo so much for sharing it. 🙂
thisreadingmama says
April 10, 2017 at 8:13 amYou’re welcome!