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The Eight Parts of Speech

Every English word has a job — and the job, not the word, decides the label

Free trail · English · ages 11–12 · 6 stations

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Meet All Eight

A part of speech is the grammatical job a word does in a sentence. There are eight of them, and between them they account for every word you will ever read.

  1. Names a person, place, thing, idea or quality — Meera, Kolkata, monsoon, honesty. Test: can you put the in front of it?
  2. Stands in for a noun so you do not repeat it — she, they, it, who, myself. The noun it replaces is called its antecedent.
  3. Says what is done or what is — ran, thinks, is, has been. Test: can you shift it into the past tense? Every clause needs one.
  4. Modifies a noun, meaning it narrows or describes it — ripe mango, three books, Tamil poetry.

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What your child does, station by station

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  1. 📚 Meet All Eight

    Flip cards

    A part of speech is the grammatical job a word does in a sentence. There are eight of them, and between them they account for every word you will ever read.

    Eight categories cover every word in the language. Flip every card.

  2. 🔀 The Word Does Not Decide — The Job Does

    Try it

    People try to memorise which part of speech a word "is". That is the wrong question. The same word changes category depending on what it is doing in that sentence.

    The single biggest misunderstanding about grammar. Fix it here.

  3. 🔎 The Little Words

    Sorting baskets

    The short words carry enormous grammatical weight, which is exactly why they get muddled. A preposition positions, a conjunction joins, a pronoun replaces.

    Prepositions, conjunctions and pronouns are short and easy to confuse. Sort them.

  4. 🧪 A Test for Each Category

    Matching pairs

    Instead of guessing, apply a test. Match each part of speech to the question that reliably identifies it.

    Every part of speech has a question that identifies it. Match them up.

  5. 🎚️ One Sentence, All Eight

    Slider explorer

    This single sentence contains all eight parts of speech. Slide through them and watch each category light up where it appears.

    Slide through the eight categories and watch them light up in one sentence.

  6. 🎯 Practice Zone

    Practice Zone

    Ten questions matched to this topic — fresh every visit.

    Ten questions on this topic. New ones every time you come back.

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