Grammatical Terms

Foundation Stage

The main terms we use in Foundation are:

Full Stops - Full stops are used to end a sentence or abbreviation.

Capital Letters - A capital letter is used at the beginning of a sentence or for the word I, the name of a person, place or thing.

Finger spaces - A space the size of a finger that goes between words to separate words.

Phoneme - The smallest unit of sound made by one letter.

Diagraph - The individual sound that 2 letters make.

Trigraph - The individual sound that 3 letters make.

Grapheme - Letters that represent the phoneme.

Cursive letter formation - The way we begin to teach all children letter formation by going 'up the wave' to aid future joining up of writing.

Key Stage One

The main terms we use in Year One are:

Letter Family - Each letter belongs to a letter family which helps with the formation of letters. Letter families also include ascenders ( t,l,h) and descenders (g,y,p).

Conjunctions - a word used to connect clauses or sentences e.g. and, because, but.

A Year One Grammar Glossary can be found here

The main terms we use in Year Two are:

Noun phrase - expanded noun phrase

Compound - compound word

Comma - comma in lists

Exclamation - exclamation sentence

Prefix - A word placed before another e.g. happy + prefix un = Unhappy

Comparative adjective - compare the differences between 2 nouns e.g taller

Superlative adjective - compare 3 or more nouns. e.g. widest

Contractions - shortened version of the written and spoken forms of a word. e.g. I have contracted form = I've

A Year Two Grammar Glossary can be found here

Upper Key Stage Two

The grammar glossary for Upper Key Stage Two can be found here