Spelling and punctuation — the quiet marks

Why these are worth the time

Comprehension gets the attention, but spelling, punctuation and grammar carry marks too — and unlike comprehension, they are largely rule-based. That makes them learnable in a way that "understanding a passage" is not.

If a child's practice shows English weaker than Maths, this is very often where it actually sits.

Apostrophes: two jobs, endlessly confused

Apostrophes do exactly two things, and almost every error comes from mixing them up:

Missing letters. do not becomes don't; it is becomes it's.
Belonging. the girl's bag is one girl; the girls' bags is several.

The one worth drilling is its against it's. It's always means it is or it has — if the sentence does not work when expanded, it is its. That single test settles most of them.

Commas: the ones that actually appear

Comma rules can be taught endlessly, but a few cover most questions:

Separating items in a list.
After an opening phrase — After the match, they went home.
Around an aside that could be lifted out — My brother, who is eleven, plays football.

Reading a sentence aloud helps: a comma usually sits where a speaker would naturally pause.

Common spelling traps

Words that sound the same: there / their / they're, to / too / two, were / where / we're.
Doubling before an ending: running, stopped, bigger.
Plurals that change: knives, children, stories.
The words nearly everyone gets wrong once: separate, definitely, because, believe.

How to practise without it becoming a chore

Five or ten minutes is plenty. Work on one rule at a time until it holds, rather than a scattering of everything.

The most useful source of words is your child's own mistakes. A short list of words they have got wrong, revisited a few days later and again a week after that, beats any generic list — because the spacing is what moves them into memory, and the words are ones that actually trip them up.

Watch the sub-topic, not the subject

"English is weak" is not actionable. Apostrophes are weak is. If your practice shows accuracy by sub-topic, use it — three focused sessions on the one weak rule will do more than three weeks of general English work.