KS2 Word Classes and Sentence Structure

A great deal of the Year 6 grammar test comes down to naming things accurately: which word is the determiner, which group of words is the subject, whether what you are looking at is a clause or only a phrase. These ten questions ask exactly those things, one sentence at a time, with the sentence written out in front of you. Some of the distinctions are ones pupils meet without ever being told they are distinctions — the word his in front of a noun is doing a different job from the word hers standing on its own, and the test will happily put both in the same sentence and ask which is the possessive pronoun. Others are a matter of finding the verb: a clause has one, a phrase does not, and that single check settles most of these questions on its own. Every explanation names what the three wrong options actually are, so a pupil who picks the adjective when asked for the adverb finds out what they picked instead of just being told they were wrong. Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with any exam board and it is not an exam centre.

• Pick out the determiner, the subordinating conjunction and the modal verb in a sentence
• Tell a possessive pronoun from a possessive determiner by whether a noun follows it
• Identify the subject of a sentence and the object of a verb, including when both are groups of words
• Find the subordinate clause and see why it cannot stand on its own
• Tell a clause from a phrase by looking for a subject and a verb
• Recognise an expanded noun phrase and separate it from a prepositional phrase
• Say what job a word is doing in a sentence, not just what class it belongs to

Sam forgot his lunch, so Priya shared hers. Which word is a possessive pronoun? — hers. It stands on its own in place of her lunch, while his comes in front of the noun lunch and is therefore a possessive determiner.