Nouns and Pronouns revealed!

Here we go!  This is the first part of our SPaG series of blog posts and it’s all about nouns and pronouns!

Nouns name things.  There are four different types of nouns that your child needs to know and be able to spot them in a sentence.  These are:

✔ Common nouns – everyday words like cup, phone, elephant, box, strawberry.  These can be singular (one of them) or plural (two or more – cups, phones, elephants, boxes, strawberries)

✔ Proper Nouns – these are names for individuals, places or things, including days of the week and months of the year – for example Monday, February, Crewe Street, Leeds, Niagra Falls.  They ALWAYS have a capital letter to start them!

✔ Collective nouns – these are names for groups of things – a flock of birds, a group of people, a herd of cows, a murder of crows.

✔ Abstract nouns – these are the names of things you can’t see, hear, smell, touch or taste.  They are names of concepts or ideas. These include: intelligence, love, friendship, idea, happiness.

Pronouns are words we use in place of a noun, or a noun phrase. There are three types:

✔ Personal pronouns – these are used to replace a name, generally to avoid repetition in a sentence and to make it sound less clunky (which is not a technical term, but it should be, right?!)

For example: Mikey enjoys the IT lesson and Mikey looks forward to the IT lesson every week.  Yep, clunky!  We could replace some of the proper nouns (Mikey) and noun phrases (IT lesson) with pronouns and make it much better:

Mikey enjoys the IT lesson and HE looks forward to IT every week.

These are the personal pronouns – I, you, she, he, it, they, me, him, her and them.

✔ Possessive pronouns show who something belongs to: mine, your, our, their,  his, hers, its, yours, ours and theirs. For example:

This book belongs to Mikey. It is his book.

And finally we have:

✔ Relative pronouns – these are used to add more information about a noun in a sentence: that, who, where, when and which.  For example: Mikey went to visit his aunt, who lives in London. (Did ya see I slipped a little possessive pronoun in that sentence too? I’m sneaky like that!)

And there we go! All you need to know about nouns and pronouns for the Year 6 SATs!

Top photo by PNG Design on Unsplash