Grammar and punctuation: fix the sentence

Grammar words, explained simply

Children meet a lot of new words for talking about sentences. Here is what each one means, in plain words, with an example like the ones on the sheets. The year shows when the National Curriculum brings the word in.

Noun Year 2

A naming word for a person, place, animal or thing.The dog ran into the park.

Verb Year 2

A doing or being word. It tells you what happens or what is.Mia jumped in the puddle.

Adjective Year 2

A describing word. It tells you more about a noun.a fluffy rabbit

Adverb Year 2

Tells you more about a verb: how, when or where something happens. Many end in -ly.The owl hooted softly.

Conjunction Year 3

A joining word that links words or parts of a sentence, such as and, but, or, because, when and if.I wore my coat because it was cold.

Preposition Year 3

Shows where or when something is, compared with something else.The cat slept under the table.

Pronoun Year 4

A word used instead of a noun, so you don’t keep repeating it: I, you, he, she, it, we, they, him, her, them.Ava lost her hat. She looked everywhere.

Sentence types Year 2

A statement tells you something. A question asks and ends with ?. A command tells someone what to do. An exclamation starts with What or How and ends with !.What a big dog that is!

Apostrophes Years 2–4

Two jobs. They show where letters are missing, and they show who something belongs to. With more than one owner ending in s, the apostrophe goes after the s.do not → don’tthe girl’s coat · the girls’ coats

Inverted commas Years 3–4

Also called speech marks. They go around the words someone says. The punctuation at the end of the spoken words goes inside them.“Can we go to the park?” asked Leo.

Fronted adverbial Year 4

Words at the start of a sentence that say when, where or how something happened. Put a comma after them.After lunch, we played football.

Relative clause Year 5

Adds information about a noun. It starts with who, which, where, when, whose or that.The girl who won the race is my sister.

Active and passive Year 6

In an active sentence, the one doing the action comes first. In a passive sentence, the thing the action happens to comes first.Ella kicked the ball. (active)The ball was kicked by Ella. (passive)

Tips for parents

1. Spot punctuation in the books you read together. Stop at a question mark and ask why it’s there. Point out the inverted commas when a character speaks, and the capital letter on a name.
2. Read writing aloud. Ask your child to read their own writing out loud. Where they pause or take a breath is often where a full stop or comma belongs.
3. Correct gently. Pick one thing to fix at a time, and say what’s right first. Marking the sheet together with the answer page turns mistakes into a chat rather than a red pen.
4. Say it before you write it. For joining words, tenses and Standard English, say the sentence out loud first. Most children can hear when “we was” sounds wrong in a sentence they read carefully.
5. Little and often. One sheet on one skill is plenty for a session. Use Mixed now and then to look back over earlier skills.
6. The bands are a guide. If a skill is new, start with an earlier band, even if your child is older.

What the National Curriculum says, year by year

English Appendix 2 of the National Curriculum for England sets out the vocabulary, grammar and punctuation for each year. Here are the main points, in our own words, with the ones these sheets practise.

• Year 1. Leaving spaces between words; joining words and ideas with and; starting to use capital letters, full stops, question marks and exclamation marks to show where sentences begin and end; capital letters for names and for I.
• Year 2. Joining ideas with and, but and or, and with when, if, that and because; knowing whether a sentence is a statement, question, exclamation or command; using the present and past tense correctly and consistently; commas in lists; apostrophes for missing letters and for one owner. Children also learn the words noun, verb, adjective and adverb.
• Year 3. Choosing a or an; using conjunctions, adverbs and prepositions to say when, where and why; starting to use inverted commas for direct speech.
• Year 4. Telling plural and possessive -s apart, and apostrophes for plural owners; Standard English verb forms, such as we were rather than we was, and I did rather than I done; fronted adverbials, with a comma after them; choosing a pronoun or a noun to avoid repetition; full punctuation for direct speech.
• Year 5. Relative clauses starting with who, which, where, when, whose or that; using modal verbs and adverbs to show how likely something is; brackets, dashes or commas for parenthesis; commas to make the meaning clear.
• Year 6. Using the passive; the difference between informal speech and formal writing, including subjunctive forms such as If I were; semicolons, colons and dashes between main clauses; a colon to introduce a list; hyphens to avoid ambiguity, such as man-eating shark.

Source: National Curriculum in England: English programmes of study, English Appendix 2: Vocabulary, grammar and punctuation (Department for Education). © Crown copyright 2013, Open Government Licence v3.0. Summarised in our own words. All the sentences on the sheets are written by us.