Parts of Speech Teaching Resources

Teach students the parts of speech this school year with printable worksheets, descriptive language activities, sorting games and more elementary school teaching resources designed to help extend and improve your students' understanding of nouns, verbs, adjectives and more.

This extensive collection of teaching resources has been created by teachers for teachers like you. Aligned to the Common Core curriculum, the ELA collection includes editable worksheets and teaching presentations and more to save elementary teachers time on lesson planning.

Created by expert teachers, each resource in this grammar collection has been carefully reviewed and curated by our team. That means it's ready to use in the classroom! You'll even find editable resources, plus differentiated options.

New to teaching parts of speech, or just looking for fresh ways to engage your students? Read on for a primer from our teaching team!

What Is a Part of Speech? Kid-Friendly Definition

Teaching parts of speech? Here's a way to explain what they mean to your students in a kid-friendly manner.

A part of speech is a word we use to describe certain types of words based on how they function in sentences. When we can categorize words according to their part of speech, we know which grammatical rules to use.

How Many Parts of Speech Are There?

There are eight different parts of speech within the English language. These include:

1. Noun — A word that represents a person, place or thing
2. Pronoun —A word that is used in place of a noun, such as "he" or "I"
3. Adjective — A word that describes a noun or pronoun
4. Verb — A word that expresses action or a state of being
5. Adverb —A word that describes a verb, adjective or other adverb
6. Preposition — A word that shows the relationship between a noun or pronoun and other words in a sentence
7. Conjunction —A word that connects words, phrases, or clauses in a sentence, such as "and" or "but"
8. Interjection — A word or phrase that expresses strong emotion or surprise, such as "Wow"

Fun Activities for Teaching Parts of Speech

This collection is full of fun activities designed to engage students with the various parts of speech, and our teacher team has a few more favorites to inspire your grammar lessons!

1. Funny Sentence Game — Introduce the five main parts of speech — noun, verb, pronoun, adjective and adverb — and have students complete a mind map about each, including examples. Next, write a few sentences on the whiteboard that are missing a few words with lines drawn where the word is missing. As a whole class task, determine which part of speech should go in each blank space, marking down that part of speech below the line. Once they've all been labelled, have students take it in pairs, creating funny sentences by filling in words that fit the parts of speech.
2. Parts of Speech Find It Game — Split students into small groups with an even amount of students, and give each group a copy of the local newspaper and a set of different colored pencils. Assign each part of speech a color. Each group should assign one color/part of speech to one member. Set a timer, and challenge students to find and circle as many of their assigned part of speech as they can during the time allowed. The group that finds the most words that are correctly labeled wins!
3. Parts of Speech Egg Hunt — Collect plastic Easter eggs (many teachers have them hiding in a closet, so ask around if you don't have your own!). Create a color code for parts of speech similar to the one in activity 2. Hide sentences inside the eggs, then hide the eggs around the classroom and set a timer. Students then have to find one egg at a time, identify a certain part of speech based on the egg color code, and write down the answer before they can move on to find another egg. The student who wins is the one who finds the most eggs (and has correctly written down the most correct words) by the time your timer goes off.
4. Parts of Speech Board Games — Challenge students to create their own board games based on these important words, demonstrating their understanding of proper use.