KS2 Punctuation Rules — Year 6 Guide for SATs GPS

Punctuation Marks Worth the Most

Commas and apostrophes come up every single year. Without fail. If your child only revises two punctuation topics, make it these two. They account for more marks than colons, semicolons, brackets, and dashes put together.

That said, a child aiming for a high score needs to know all of them. Let’s go through each one.

Commas

Commas have five main jobs in Year 6 writing. Your child should know all of them:

• In lists — “She packed apples, sandwiches, crisps and juice.” (No comma before “and” in British English.)
• After fronted adverbials — “Without warning, the fire alarm went off.” If the sentence starts with a when/where/how phrase, pop a comma after it. See our 50+ fronted adverbial examples for a full list.
• Around relative clauses — “The dog, which was enormous, barked loudly.” See our relative clauses guide for the full picture.
• Before conjunctions in compound sentences — “I wanted to go outside, but it was raining.”
• To separate clauses — “Although it was cold, they went swimming.”

The trick is reading the sentence aloud. If there’s a natural pause, there’s probably a comma. It’s not a perfect rule, but it works surprisingly often.

Apostrophes

Apostrophes have exactly two jobs. Only two. Drilling this into your child’s head will save them from the most common punctuation mistake in Year 6.

• Contraction — squashing two words together: don’t, can’t, it’s (it is), wouldn’t. The apostrophe sits where the missing letters were.
• Possession — showing something belongs to someone: the dog’s bone, the children’s playground, James’s book.

This catches out adults, let alone children. If your child can get “its” and “it’s” right every time, they’re ahead of most grown-ups.

Inverted Commas (Speech Marks)

The rules are straightforward, but children forget them under pressure:

• Open inverted commas before the first word spoken.
• Close them after the punctuation at the end of the speech.
• New speaker = new line.

Notice the comma inside the speech marks before “said Tom”. That’s the bit most children miss. The punctuation for the spoken words goes insidethe inverted commas.

Colons and Semicolons

These two scare children, but they’re actually quite simple.

Colon — introduces a list or an explanation. Think of it as saying “here it comes”:

Semicolon — joins two related sentences that could stand alone. It’s stronger than a comma but softer than a full stop:

Both halves must be complete sentences. If either side doesn’t make sense on its own, a semicolon is wrong. That’s the quickest check.

Brackets, Dashes, and Commas for Parenthesis

These three do the same job: they wrap extra information inside a sentence. SATs often asks children to choose which one to use or to swap between them.

All three are correct. In practice, commas are the most common. Brackets feel more formal. Dashes feel more casual. But the GPS paper just wants your child to recognise that they’re interchangeable.

Hyphens

A hyphen joins compound words: well-known, ice-cream, twenty-one. It’s not the same as a dash. Dashes are longer and separate parts of a sentence. Hyphens are short and glue words together.

SATs occasionally tests whether children know the difference. The simplest way to remember: a hyphen joins, a dash separates.

What SATs Actually Tests

GPS punctuation questions usually come in one of these forms:

• “Insert the missing punctuation in this sentence.”
• “Which sentence uses punctuation correctly?” (multiple choice)
• “Rewrite this sentence with correct punctuation.”
• “Explain why a comma / apostrophe is used in this sentence.”

They’re testing whether your child knows the rules, not whether they can write beautifully. That means targeted practice on each punctuation mark is the fastest way to pick up marks.