Grammar has always been part of English teaching, however now grammar terminology and understanding how our writing is structured has become more of a priority. Sometimes children are being taught terminology which might be new to parents and carers, so we would like to help and are adding some information to help. We hope you find this useful. Please see below. 

Adjectives

 

An adjective is the word that describes a noun. Children use adjectives regularly in their writing and it is more effective when they are able to vary them, as it is more interesting to read. Below is a word list to show you some difficult examples. There are many more examples but these are some to give you a start.  

Adverbs

 

An adverb is a word which modifies a verb, which means that it tells you how, when, where or why something is being done.

Consider the following sentence:

If you add an adverb, it gives you more information about the characters or the action in the sentence, for example:

tells us more about the feelings of the person involved.

Coordinating Conjunctions

 

Coordinating conjunctions. Conjunctions are joining words that link together parts of a sentence. The three main coordinating conjunctions are 'and', 'but' and 'or'. They can be used to join together two clauses in a sentence.

Expanded Noun Phrases

 

An expanded noun phrase is a phrase made up of a noun and at least one adjective. If one or more adjectives are listed to describe the noun, a comma should be added to separate the sentence.

Fronted Adverbials

 

Fronted Adverbials are extremely important in descriptive writing. They can easily describe how an action occurred, where it occurred and when. They are phrases/words that are implemented at the start of a sentence, which is used to describe the action that follows. 

 

Please see the word list below to show you some examples of this but also how they can be grouped into different types. 

Parenthesis

 

A parenthesis is a word, phrase, or clause inserted into a sentence as an explanation or afterthought. When a parenthesis is removed, the surrounding text is still makes sense.

 

Subordinating Conjunctions

 

A conjunction is a word, or words, used to connect two clauses together. Words such as: 'although', 'because' or 'when' . ... A subordinating conjunction is simply the word/words that is used to join a subordinating clause to another clause or sentence.

Verbs

 

A verb is a word used to describe an action, state or occurrence. Verbs can be used to describe an action, that's doing something. For example, like the word 'jumping' in this sentence: The rabbit was jumping in the field.