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In Year 5, your child should have a solid foundation in grammar, a broad and varied vocabulary, a range of punctuation tools to use, and good spelling knowledge. It can be difficult to support your child with their grammar if you’re unfamiliar with the technical terms associated with it. This page explains each skill and the associated terminology, and gives you lots of suggestions for fun activities your young learner can do to develop their grammar skills!
Before we jump into Year 5 grammar, download this checklist of skills that your child should know by the time they reach this level.
Interjections are words that we use to express sudden strong emotions, such as joy, pain, and excitement. They often stand alone and should be followed by punctuation. Strong interjections are usually followed by an exclamation point. Mild interjections are followed with a comma or period.
Challenge your child to complete interactive games and quizzes using interjections. The example below can be found on Night Zookeeper and challenges children to select the most appropriate interjection for a given context.
The perfect tenses connect actions in time and use a form of the verb to have (has, have, had, will have) plus a past participle (verb form usually used to express a completed action).
The past perfect tense connects two past events and clarifies which event came first.
Will had been working on his painting when the portal at the zoo opened.
The present perfect tense connects events in the past to the present.
Sam and Will have been friends since they first met.
The future perfect tense connects events to the future.
Sam will have been a spying giraffe in training for a year by the winter.
An inappropriate shift in verb tense is when a writer changes tense within a sentence or text without valid reason. The more familiar a child is with different verb tenses, the more able they are to identify when there has been an incorrect shift in tense and avoid these in their own writing.
Here are some examples that you can show to your child:
Correlative conjunctions are pairs of conjunctions that work together within a sentence.
Either we have spaghetti or pizza for dinner.
Both my dog and my cat love to play.
This quiz on Night Zookeeper requires children to match the correlative conjunctions with the correct partner.
Night Zookeeper can help your young learner level up their grammar skills in a matter of weeks!
Our award-winning reading & writing program covers all the grammar rules young learners should understand in Year 5, featuring word games, grammar lessons, exciting challenges, and much more.
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