Parts of speech worksheets

The word being asked about is chosen so that it cannot honestly be called anything else, and that took more discarding than choosing. “Play”, “run”, “walk” and “watch” are nouns as often as verbs; “fast”, “hard” and “well” are adjectives and adverbs both; “light” is three things. None of them is on this sheet. The verbs here are past tense or the opening word of a command, which is the cheapest way in English to make a word class unarguable.

Articles and possessives are not asked about either, and that is a deliberate gap rather than an oversight. Whether “the” is an adjective or a determiner depends entirely on which scheme a child is being taught, and a sheet cannot mark a child on which classroom they happen to be sitting in. Five classes, all of them agreed on, is worth more than nine with two arguments buried in them.

The answers were not worked out by a program reading the sentences. Every sentence on this page was written down and tagged — what it is for, where it divides, which one word can be named without argument — and the questions are views of those tags. That is the only honest way to print a grammar key: a sheet that marks a defensible answer wrong teaches a child something false, which is worse than no sheet at all. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from, so the identical sheet can be had again next week.

This page is one sheet out of a family that prints five lessons. The topic is a setting rather than a different worksheet: parts of speech, subject and predicate, kinds of sentence, the mark at the end, and the word that needs a capital. Two of the five can be asked either way — circled from a list of names, or written out on a ruled line — and how many sentences and how many columns are switches beside them.

The settings travel in the link rather than on a server, so a sheet you make can be bookmarked or sent to another family as it stands — and the Name: line is printed blank, because there is nowhere in a shared link to put a child’s name. See what we don’t collect.

A sentence is only as good as its spelling, and the shelf next door prints that half: this week’s list in five shapes, sight words to trace and find, and ten pages on how words work. Word Jungle then reads the same lists aloud, which is the one thing paper cannot do — and the record book keeps track of which words a child keeps missing, so the next sheet can be exactly those.