‘An excellent, happy school, where we enjoy learning’
Glossary of Grammar and Punctuation Terms
Year 1
Spelling
Compound Word: contain two or more root words.
Consonant: all other letters that are NOT vowels
Digraph: two letter represent one sound
Grapheme: a letter or combination of letters that represents a phoneme in a word.
Phoneme: the smallest unit of sound in a word.
Plural: more than one, has the suffix s or es
Prefix: A prefix is added at the beginning of a word in order to turn it into another word, e.g. disappear.
Root word: words that can stand alone
Singular: one person or thing
Suffix: A suffix is an ‘ending’, used at the end of one word to turn it into another word, e.g. teacher.
Syllable: A syllable sounds like a beat in a word. They consist of at least one vowel and possibly one or more consonants
Trigraph: three letters that represent one sound
Vowels: the letters, a e i o u
Grammar and Punctuation
Adjectives: We introduce this to the children as a word that describes the noun e.g. the beautiful butterfly
Conjunction: A conjunction links two words or phrases together, e.g. when, and, but, because.
Noun: We introduce this to the children as the name of a person, place or thing. Some nouns are proper nouns so they need a capital letter (e.g. Ivan, Wednesday).
Sentence: A group of words that are grammatically connected to each that makes sense.
Verbs: We introduce this to the children as the doing word.
Punctuation
Year 2
Continue to develop their understanding and use of Year 1 terminology
Spelling
Contractions: the shortening of words using an apostrophe e.g. can’t, I’ll
Homophone: Two different words that sound the same but are spelt differently, e.g. hear, here.
Near Homophone: Two words that are spelt the same but have different meanings.
Grammar and Punctuation
Adverb: We introduce this to the children as a word that describes the verb e.g. silently crept
Clause: A clause is a special type of phrase that has a verb. They can be a main or subordinate, e.g. It was raining.
Co-ordination – Linking two words or phrases as an equal pair using the conjunctions and but so or
Noun Phrase: A noun phrase usually contains a noun plus other words to describe it e.g The shabby dog slept.
Preposition: When or where something happens, e.g. to, at, outside
Pronouns: Used instead of the specific names, e.g. he, she
Subordination – when linking a main clause (this could be a sentence on it’s own) with a subordinate clause.
Tenses: In English, tense is the choice between present and past verbs.
Types of sentence:
Punctuation
For more information on these terms see the National Curriculum glossary below.