Adding Quotation Marks Worksheet

Quotation marks are the punctuation marks that show a reader exactly which words came out of a speaker’s mouth. Third graders meet them everywhere — in chapter books, in comic strips, and in the dialogue they write themselves — and the rule is simple once it has been practiced: the opening mark goes in front of the speaker’s first word, and the closing mark goes after the end punctuation of what was said. This Adding Quotation Marks Worksheet gives students a focused set of sentences to work through so that rule becomes automatic. Instead of memorizing a definition, they read real dialogue, find the exact words that were spoken, and mark them.

The sheet is built in two parts. In Part A, students read six sentences of dialogue that are missing their quotation marks and add the marks in the right places. In Part B, they write three sentences over again, supplying both the comma that separates the speech tag and the quotation marks around the spoken words. Use this 3rd grade punctuation worksheet as guided practice after a mini-lesson on dialogue, as morning work, as a quick review before a writing unit, or as a homework page. Because the answer key is included, students can check their own work and a partner can score a classmate’s page in about a minute.

What’s Included

• 1 print-ready PDF worksheet
• Answer key
• 6 add-the-quotation-marks sentences and 3 full-sentence rewrites

This adding quotation marks worksheet helps in three ways. First, it isolates one skill, so nothing competes for attention — every sentence on the page is about the same rule. Second, it moves students from recognition to production: Part A asks where the marks belong, while Part B asks them to write the whole sentence correctly, which is what they will actually have to do in their own stories. Third, the sentences describe ordinary classroom and family moments, so students are reading language they already speak and can hear the quotation in their heads before they ever mark it.

Away from the page, ask students to read a page of a favorite chapter book out loud and hold up two fingers to show where the quotation marks belong. Have partners write a four-line conversation between two characters, trade papers, and check each other’s punctuation. Copy a short comic strip and have students turn the speech bubbles into written dialogue with the correct marks. You can also keep a class chart of speech tags — said, asked, shouted, whispered, replied — so writers have alternatives to said and still remember the comma that follows.

Related Resources

• Quotations Punctuation Worksheet
• Commas Punctuation Worksheet
• Correcting Punctuation Worksheet
• Subject and Predicate Song (Have Fun Teaching)