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It’s Fluency Friday for our 30 Days of Reading Fun for Beginning Readers series! Understanding punctuation is vital for helping our kids to become fluent readers. Our beginning readers should be able to model the correct inflection for each punctuation mark.

I chose to focus on periods, question marks, and exclamation marks for this activity for very beginning readers. It is SUPER important to model aloud the proper inflection for each punctuation mark. One’s voice stays steady when reading a sentence with a period at the end and the reader must pause. A sentence with a question mark will often cause the reader’s voice to go up in pitch. And finally, a sentence ending with a question mark will be characterized with excitement and energy.

Reading aloud to your child on a regular basis is the best and most natural way to teach inflection. Isolating the individual punctuation marks can also be extremely helpful to beginning readers who are still relying on decoding. That’s where this activity comes in! This printable and activity is perfect for working one-on-one with a child. It can also be used in the classroom as a partner activity.

For this Punctuation Sentences for Fluency activity, you will need:

-Cube with a punctuation mark written on each side (we bought our dry erase die at Dollar Tree)

–Our Punctuation Sentences for Fluency printable

-Pencils or crayons for recording

Download this Punctuation Sentences for Fluency Printable.

Write various punctuation marks on your cube/die. I wrote 2 questions marks, exclamation marks, and periods.

2. Have your child roll the die and then write the corresponding punctuation mark at the end of each sentence

3. Encourage your child to decode each sentence and then read it aloud with the proper inflection!

Obviously, the sentences that end with a question mark are not going to be written as a proper sentence. But the idea is to get your child to practice changing the pitch of their voice to match the punctuation mark.