Types of sentences worksheets

Statements and commands both end in a period, and telling them apart is the whole exercise. “The old tractor belonged to Jack” and “Put the muddy boots outside the door” look identical at the end of the line, and the only way through is to ask what the sentence is for — one of them says how the world is, and the other tells somebody to change it. Questions and exclamations are the easy half, and they are there so a six-year-old can start.

Every exclamation on this sheet is an exclamation by its grammar rather than by its tone: “What a tremendous splash that was!” and “How brightly the lights of Oslo shone!” cannot be written any other way. That rules out a whole class of sentence a worksheet usually smuggles in — the plain statement with a bang on the end, where whether it should have been a period is a matter of how loudly you were imagining it. There is no right answer to that, so it is not asked.

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.