11 Plus Exams Forum

My DD who will be in year 5 this Sept is generally good in punctuation but always gets confused with apostrophes where it shows possession for plural nouns. e.g. if it should be Children's or Childrens', Boys' or Boy's (assuming it should be boys' in this case).

Her school teacher explained to the class as I saw the home work few weeks back. She got it then and forgot after few days. I tried explaining this to her few times. She gets it and then forgets it again. May be I am not explaining her properly. Can any one suggest any good resource that can help please?


many thanks

Children is already the plural of child, so children's is the possessive. The apostrophe comes after the thing which is doing the possessing, so to speak, so boy's for a boy and boys' for more than one boy.

I was taught it as e.g.'The child(, hi)'s toy' etc. You just have to remember that for plurals, the ' represents " , their', which admittedly might be a bit confusing at this stage.

This may assist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOtMa2JyfXk" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

That was really fun learning.

Thank you quasimodo for the link and thank you ToadMum for the kind response. Will try my luck again this week-end.

So hard being a parent