All things grammar
/All things grammar – for children aged 4-6
Blog written by Maria Mazarese, Creative Minds Tutors Director.
A lot of my clients will often ask me the following questions:
What do I need to do in order to help to support my child to do this?
How can I help them to understand?
Where do I start?
When it comes to grammar, it can be a little overwhelming! There is a lot to cover! However, I’d like to share the strategies that we use here at Creative Minds Tutors to support our children. We will be a providing a series of courses to parents to help to support their children in developing their grammatical skills, ensuring that they have fully understood concepts and helping them to excel in their learning.
Here is a sneak peek into what the courses will look like! We will be covering all age groups and all grammatical elements that your children will need to know. We will explain the best methods (in our opinion!) to teach them!
So, let’s start with children aged 4-6.
Of course, you will need to decide when it is the best time for your child to start learning these grammatical concepts. We will be here to guide you with anything you may need. We are here to support you and answer any questions that you may have.
1) Regular plural noun suffixes:
Children will need to be able to correctly use these suffixes within their sentences. They will need to use the suffixes ‘-s’ and ‘es’. They will need to understand their effect on the meaning of nouns. First of all you need to ensure that your child knows the meaning of the words plural, noun and suffix. A plural is more than one, a noun is a name, place or thing and a suffix is a group of letters that are placed at the end of words.
Once they are secure with this, you can ask them to write sentences with words ending in
‘-s’ or ‘-es’.
Eg. trees, birds, foxes, boxes.
The trees were beautiful.
The birds sang a joyful song.
The foxes hid behind the trees.
2) Verb suffixes
Children will need to use verb suffixes which can be added to verbs where no change is needed in the spelling of the root words.
Eg. -ing and -ed
Again, before beginning you need to ensure that your child know what a verb is and recap what a suffix is. A verb is a doing or an action word.
Examples of sentences:
The girl is playing with her toys.
Dad cleaned the table.
Mum looked surprised.
3) The prefix -un
The children will need to know that the prefix -un changes the meaning of verbs and adjectives.
Before beginning, ensure that your child knows what a prefix is. A prefix is a group of letters that are placed at the beginning of a word.
Examples of sentences:
The girl was unable to complete the puzzle. Here the prefix ‘un-‘ tells us that she was NOT able to do it.
The carpet was untidy. The prefix ‘un-‘ tells us that the carpet was NOT tidy.
She felt that it was unfair. The prefix ‘un-‘ tells us that is was NOT fair.
4) Conjunctions
The children will need to know that conjunctions are joining words. They join clauses using the words ‘and, but and so’.
Before beginning, ensure that your child knows what a phrase is. A phrase is a part of a sentence. This is something children tend to forget so repetition is key here.
Examples of sentences:
The girl opened her package and was delighted.
She wanted to study but it was dinner time.
He was hungry so he ate his dinner.
5) Punctuation
The children will need to be able to use capital letters, full stops, question marks and exclamation marks correctly within their sentences. They also need to know that the personal pronoun ‘I’ needs a capital letter. At this stage they don’t need to know what a personal pronoun is. Just that the letter ‘I’ on its own is ALWAYS capital.
Examples of sentences:
Why is the girl sad?
What a wonderful gift!
6) Proof reading to ensure that sentences make sense.
This is a wonderful skill to develop from a very young age. I find that the younger children that we teach love to be ‘done’. But when we ask them if they have checked their learning, they mostly say that they haven’t. We teach all of our children from a very young age to read carefully over their sentences. Check if they have left important words or punctuation out. We teach them early on that it is absolutely fine to make mistakes but that it is important to correct them. Proof reading is certainly a vital skill to develop early on.
Happy Creative Grammar Learning everyone!
Email us if you have any questions at all regarding this. If you would like extra support with your child’s learning, please contact us at:
office@creativemindstutors.com
07956677783
