Subject and predicate worksheets

Asking for both halves rather than one is the whole design of this page. “Write the subject” is a question with two defensible answers — the complete subject and the simple subject — and a child taught one of them would be marked wrong for giving it. Asking a child to place every word closes that door: “dog” on its own cannot be right, because “The big brown” would then have nowhere to go.

The sentences are all plain statements, which is also deliberate. A command has no subject on the page at all — “Close the gate” is addressed to somebody who is never named — and a question keeps its subject inside the verb phrase, where a nine-year-old cannot fairly be asked to find it. Those are good things to talk about and bad things to mark, so they are on the sentence-types page instead.

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.