Capitalization Games



There are many games you can play with your students to teach them about capitalization rules. Your aim should to be to make learning about capitalization entertaining and interactive, allowing students to feel comfortable making mistakes and learning together. You can try to make up your own games, or you can find ones that have been tested by teachers throughout the country. Here are is a popular game idea to get you started:

My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean: a Capitalization Game.

Before playing, prepare at least 15 sentences that are chock full of proper adjectives, nouns, and other capitalized parts of speech. When you are ready to play, have your students sit at their desks. Read a sentence to the class. Then, repeat the sentence aloud to your students slowly, and have the students stand up or sit down each time they hear a word that should be capitalized, like is done when playing “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.” If your class has a discrepancy about the right rules and whether they should be sitting or standing up by the end of the sentence, have a class discussion and tease out the problem areas. Repeat for each sentence. Have a challenge round in which you read the sentence very quickly the second time – see if your students can keep up!