Mill Lane Primary School

    Information about GRAMMAR
                    Year 5 & 6

SENTENCES
A sentence can be:
•	A statement
eg. This is the first page of a booklet.
•	A question
eg. How old are you?
•	An exclamation
eg. What a nice surprise!
•	A command
eg. Read this booklet immediately.

EXTENDING SENTENCES
Using a fronted adverbial
eg. Padding softly on silent paws, the tiger stalked its prey.

Using a co-ordinating conjunction (eg. and, but, or)
eg. I adore chocolate but I don’t like peppermint.

Using a subordinating conjunction (eg. although, because, while, unless)
eg. We’re not going because it looks like it will rain.

Using a relative clause
(Relative clauses begin with who, which, where, when, whose, that)
eg.
My school, which is down the road, has a large playing field.
This is the lady who helps us with our spelling.
The disco that had been arranged for Friday has been cancelled.

MAIN WORD CLASSES
Noun/noun phrase – names a person, place or thing
eg.  cat, Taunton, happiness	several people, the old mill

Pronoun – takes the place of a noun
eg. he, us, it, who, ourselves, yours, his

Adjective – describes a noun or pronoun
eg. happy, yellow, biggest, smaller

Verb – doing or being word
eg. sit, ran, am, was, seemed

Adverb/adverbial – describes verbs (how, where, when)
eg.  quickly, everywhere, yesterday	without thinking

Conjunction  – joining word links two words or phrases
eg. and, but, because, although, since, or

Prepositions – describe locations, directions or time
eg. Before, after, during, in the middle, from, beneath

PUNCTUATING DIALOGUE
Note the use and positioning of capital letters, inverted commas/speech marks and general punctuation in these examples of direct speech:

“Stop talking and do your work,” said the teacher. The teacher said, “Stop talking and do your work.” “Stop talking,” said the teacher, ”and do your work.” “Can I go now?” she asked.
“Watch out!” she shouted.”Are you trying to kill us?”

When another character is about to speak, begin a new paragraph.

Inverted commas/speech marks are not used for indirect (reported) speech
eg. He said that he knew how to ski.

COMMAS
In lists
eg. We saw apes, fish, birds and snakes.

For parenthesis
eg. The forest, a scary place, is best avoided.

To separate clauses in a sentence
eg. Although it was dark, we weren’t afraid.

To separate dialogue from the rest of the sentence
eg. Alice said, “I’m going home.”

After starting a sentence with an adverbial
eg. Trembling with fear, she opened the door.

To address people
eg. Adam, I want you to go first.

APOSTROPHES
Missing letters in contractions
eg. do not – don’t	we had – we’d

Showing ownership or possession
eg. Mary’s book…	the elephant’s trunk…

Note for plural nouns:
The Wilkinsons’ house…	the children’s bags…

It’s & its
It’s is short for it is. eg. It’s hot today.
Its is used for possession. eg. It shut its eyes. Its, like hers, yours, ours and theirs, is a possessive pronoun. No apostrophe!

NEVER use apostrophes to form plurals
eg. We opened our books. (NOT book’s) We bought some CDs.	(NOT CD’s)
Back in the 1980s…	(NOT 1980’s)