Grammar Terms: Pronouns and Determiners
Know and use Year 4 grammar terminology including determiner, pronoun, possessive pronoun, and adverbial
What a learner can do afterwards
- Label the determiner, pronoun, and adverbial in 'She quickly opened her present on the table'
- Explain the difference between a possessive pronoun ('mine', 'theirs') and other pronouns ('I', 'they')
- Use the terms 'determiner' and 'adverbial' accurately when discussing a classmate's writing
1 · Read
A pronoun is a word that stands in for a noun, so you don't repeat a name again and again. Instead of saying 'Maya opened the present, and the present was blue,' you can say 'Maya opened the present, and it was blue.' Words like she, he, it, and they are pronouns.
Some pronouns show that something belongs to someone. These are possessive pronouns: mine, yours, his, hers, ours, and theirs. They stand alone, with no noun right after them. You say 'That coat is hers,' not 'That coat is hers coat.'
A determiner is different. It sits right in front of a noun to show which one, whose, or how many: the dog, her coat, three apples. If a word needs a noun after it to make sense, it is probably a determiner, not a pronoun.
Look at this sentence: 'He slowly closed his book here.' He is the pronoun, standing in for a name. His is the determiner before book. Slowly tells how, here tells where.
Some words, like her or his, can be a determiner in one sentence and a pronoun in another. Check what comes right after it: a noun next door means determiner, nothing next door means pronoun.
A determiner sits before a noun, a pronoun replaces one, and an adverbial tells you how, when, or where.
Rewritten readings were written for this dataset.
2 · Watch
Take it off screen
Where it sits
Where this leads
Jobs that lean on this skill. Follow one to see everything it is built on.
24 questions wait behind this lesson, each with its answer explained. Every answer feeds the sky: stars light as they are learned, and dim when it is time to come back.