Sentence Structure Teaching Resources

Teach students the elements of sentence structure this school year with printable worksheets, sentence-building activities, sorting games and more elementary school teaching resources designed to help extend your students' understanding of how to write clear and concise sentences that follow the rules of English grammar.

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 sentence 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 about sentence structure, or just looking for fresh ways to engage your students? Read on for a primer from our teaching team!

English Sentence Structure Explained

From subjects to predicates, objects to clauses, the English language is packed with rules specific to sentence structure that students need to learn on the way to becoming proficient writers.

Ready to break down how to build a sentence in English and look at some examples? Let's go!

Subject

The subject of a sentence is the noun or pronoun that performs the action or is described in the sentence.

For example, in the sentence "Jaquan did his homework," Jaquan is the subject.

Predicate

The predicate of a sentence expresses the action or state of being in a sentence.

Let's go back to the sentence "Jaquan did his homework." In this case, did is the predicate.

Object

The object of a sentence is a noun or pronoun that receives the action of the verb.

For example, "homework" would be the object in "Jaquan did his homework."

Complement

The complement of a sentence is a word or phrase that completes the meaning of a sentence.

The complement can be a direct object, indirect object, or subject complement.

For example: "a doctor" in "She became a doctor."

Modifier

A modifier in a sentence provides additional information about a word or phrase in the sentence. It can be an adjective or an adverb. Example: "kind" in "She was a kind teacher."

What Are Clauses?

Clauses are groups of words containing a subject and a verb. They're important to understand when learning sentence structure. After all, one kind of clause is a sentence!

There are two main types of clauses:

• Independent Clause — An independent clause can stand alone as a complete sentence because it expresses a complete thought. For example: "I did all of my homework."
• Dependent Clause — A dependent clause cannot stand alone as a sentence because it does not express a complete thought. It relies on an independent clause to make sense. Example: "When I went to the store," (Dependent clause) "I bought an apple." (Independent clause). Dependent clauses can be paired with independent clauses to build sentences.