Are you ready to teach your kindergarten students the ins and outs of grammar? I'm here to help you with kindergarten grammar worksheets and resources to make it fun and engaging!
In the early years, grammar is generally quite simplistic. We focus on the basics, like parts of speech and writing complete sentences. Although these skills can feel simple to us, they're brand new for our young learners, and they need explicit instruction and reinforcement to help them learn these concepts and form deep connections.
As an educator, I recommend spending some time to make sure you understand exactly what skills your students need to learn, then finding the right resources to scaffold them to success. Fortunately, I have a bunch of printable grammar worksheets and other activities to help you along the way!
What grammar skills should Kindergarteners learn?
The standards vary depending on where you teach, but most academic programs cover these key topics and skills in either Kindergarten or 1st Grade:
- Parts of Speech (nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, some prepositions, etc.)
- Basic sentence structure
- Compound words
- Punctuation
- Synonyms and homonyms
Although we introduce these topics in the early years, we don't necessarily expect students to use them in writing right away. For example, kindergarten students should learn basic prepositional phrases, like above, below, under, etc., but they are only expected to use them accurately in conversation or oral speech.
Teaching Grammar in Kindergarten
Real world first. It's crucial to start with concrete knowledge as much as possible at this early stage. Abstract thinking can come later; this is the time to lay the groundwork for all that higher-level thinking later on. Whenever possible, incorporate tactile experiences. When you're teaching nouns, let your students feel or touch objects. Ask students to act out the action verbs or practise moving under or over when they learn prepositions. This makes learning much more interesting and also more developmentally appropriate.
Explicit instruction. Be very explicit and organised with your instruction. Categorise words into discrete topics and make the boundaries between those types of words exceptionally clear. If something fits into a grey area, let students know that words can have different meanings. It can help to use anchor charts, visuals, or my Parts of Speech wall displays to offer students clear guidance and visual support.
Offer clear feedback. Your students need clear and consistent feedback about the connections they're making. This can look like clarifying the correct answers in the whole group lessons or having students check their answers after they complete a worksheet. This stops students from reinforcing the wrong neural pathways, which can make the learning process harder and more stressful.
Make worksheets more fun. It's tempting just to print out worksheets and pass them around - and there's definitely a time and a place for a high-quality worksheet. But, it's very important to choose resources that make sense to students and that align with your instruction. You can also break things up by using task cards, slideshows, and games to offer reinforcement in a novel way. Our brains love to have fun and try new things, so lean into that!
Get organised. If you want to teach grammar effectively and easily this year, check out The Hive! My husband and I created it as a digital teacher planner, but it is so much more than that! It contains hundreds of evidence-based worksheets, activities, videos, lesson plans, apps, and games, including all of the resources below. You'll be able to pull up anything you need at a moment's notice!
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Best Kindergarten Grammar Worksheets & Tools
Basic Grammar Slides
Set yourself up for success this year by using my Grammar Slides! There are over 320 slides to teach students in K through 3rd Grade the basics of grammar, including parts of speech, simple and compound sentences, ending punctuation, and more! This makes it so much easier to introduce and reinforce these concepts in a fun way.
Parts of Speech
This is one of the most important concepts we cover in kindergarten grammar, so you'll likely spend quite a bit of time talking about nouns and verbs. My Parts of Speech wall displays make it easy to cover everything you need to know in one convenient place! These posters come in a range of different colour palettes and themes.
The displays are quite in-depth, so they’re appropriate for all grades up to 6th grade and beyond. Just display whichever elements are appropriate to your students!
It's so handy to have the words and definitions handy at a moment's notice, and you can scaffold students to independence by teaching them to use it as a reference when they get stuck!
Nouns
There are several different noun types, and we talk about all of them in kindergarten!
- Common nouns
- Proper nouns
- Singular nouns
- Plural nouns
In the beginning, you'll want to help kids understand nouns on a basic level. That usually includes classifying nouns as a person, place, animal, or thing. This free printable noun sort is great for a print-and-go option.
My Types of Nouns Game or these clip cards are perfect for literacy stations, too!
Plural Nouns
Since plural forms have so many exceptions and variations, I highly recommend setting up my Plural Words Wall Display as a visual reference and teaching tool. It covers:
- Adding -s
- Adding -es
- Changing y to i, then add -es
- Changing f to v, then add -es
These Plural Rule Powerpoint Slides are a great way to practice the four main types of plural spellings as a whole class or in small groups.
When you're ready, introduce this interactive Plural Rule literacy center to your reading rotations! This can also be a great activity to introduce plural rules - use as a word sort and see if students can notice the patterns.
Proper Nouns
Proper nouns are specific nouns used to label people, organisations, seasons, days of the week, and more. Kindergarteners typically catch onto capitalising the names of people and schools quickly, but the more ambiguous ones can be tricky.
Students can practise sorting and categorising nouns into common or proper and labelling them. These free grammar worksheets are a great opportunity to practice both of these skills.
Adjectives
Adjectives are words used to describe nouns. Like the other parts of speech listed above, focus on adjectives your students can see, touch, or perceive. For example, you could have them describe a teddy bear or a stuffed animal. Is it big or little? White or black? Smooth or rough?
Plus, teaching adjectives is an easy way to improve your students' writing skills almost immediately!
Students need to know a few different types of adjectives, so once they understand the more descriptive adjectives, it's time to introduce comparative and superlative adjectives.
Adjectives Vs Adverbs
Young learners often get adjectives and adverbs confused, so it's important to practice sorting these two to reinforce the differences. Try these activities to help:
Verbs
In Kindergarten, we typically focus on action verbs and occasionally on the state of being or linking verbs. These are the most commonly used verb tenses in this age range, and they're much easier to understand than some of the more ambiguous options.
A note about verbs...
Verbs can be a confusing concept as they are not always ‘doing words' or ‘action words’- there are also speaking verbs, thinking/feeling verbs, and relating verbs. However, it can be hard to explain the concept of relating verbs to young students.
These posters help students to become familiar with ‘tricky verbs' so that they can identify verbs in their writing and develop their understanding of sentence structure. Displays these posters in your classroom for students to refer to during writing and grammar tasks.
Teaching verbs is a great opportunity to get kids up and moving! Pull out different verbs from a bowl and have them act out the movements.
I recommend connecting verbs to sentences early on, as this really simplifies the idea. Draw two lines on the board and have them help you write out several very simple sentences as a class. They need to figure out who (noun) is doing something (verb). This can be students in the classroom, characters in a book, etc.
The more you connect nouns and verbs like this, the easier they’ll understand subjects and predicates later on. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that in the later grades, but this is a great starting point.
You can also use my -ed Slideshow or -ing Slideshow to teach about modifying verbs to change the tense.
Basic Sentence Structure
I'm often asked about teaching sentence writing in kindergarten, and I've prepared a variety of resources to help you do just that. My Teaching Sentences in Kindergarten slideshow includes 220 slides with a variety of interactive practice opportunities, ending punctuation, Sentence of the Day templates, and much more. It's everything you need to start the process in one handy place!
You'll want to focus on these specific tasks:
- Writing a complete sentence (subject and verb)
- Identifying complete and incomplete sentences
- Starting sentences with capital letters
- Adding appropriate ending punctuation
Sentence Writing Resources for Kindergarten
- Kindergarten Sentence Printables - Cut and unjumble the words to arrange them in proper order.
- Sentence Editing Checklist - This free printable teaches the "rules" of writing and is a helpful framework as students start writing simple sentences.
- Sentence Editing Taskcards - These use CVC words to practise reading and sentence structure at the same time
- Read more about teaching Simple, Compound, and Complex Sentences
Punctuation
Teaching punctuation is part of teaching sentence structure, and it takes some time for students to learn when to properly use question marks, periods, commas, quotation marks, and more. To help, I created Punctuation Posters to fit any of my classroom themes! They're a great visual support for teaching punctuation marks and explaining when and how to use them.
You can also use these Punctuation Task Cards in your small groups or literacy centers to give students practise figuring out which one to use.
Capitalisation
In Kindergarten, students are expected to learn all of the lowercase letters and uppercase letters and also know when to use them. With 52 variations to remember, this certainly takes a fair amount of time!
These Printable Alphabet Matching Activities will help you find lots of printable activities and games to help students practice this important skill in a fun and interesting way. You can also grab this free Alphabet Match printable to get started right away.
More Phonics Activities
These kindergarten grammar worksheets are just the start! You'll also want to go in-depth teaching about short vowel sounds, sight words, and more. Explore these related posts to learn more.
- Teaching High Frequency Words in Kindergarten
- How to Orthographically Map Tricky Words
- 20 Fun Cvc Words Games & Activities to Teach Phonics
- The Best Printable Phonics Worksheets for Kindergarten
Looking For More?
You'll love The Hive's growing library of digital learning tools which can be used to consolidate a wide range of grammar skills. Some examples include our famous Beedle game (our fun take on Wordle), or our flash cards and spinner picker apps.
