Elementary English Homework Help

Help with Elementary English

Nouns

Nouns are the people, places, things and ideas you find in sentences. If a sentence doesn't contain a noun, it isn't a sentence at all. Some of the basic forms of nouns you'll need to know are described below.

Proper and Common Nouns

Two types of nouns are proper nouns and common nouns. A proper noun identifies by name a person, idea, place or thing. In writing a proper noun you must capitalize the first letter. On the other hand, common nouns are not specific and don't have to be capitalized. Here are some examples of both types of nouns:

Proper Johnny, November, Texas, Thursday and Spanish

Common cat, flower, clock, truck and love

Collective Nouns

Collective nouns are words that indicate groups, including groups of people, things or animals. Here are some familiar collective nouns:

• Army
• Herd
• Flock
• Society
• Team
• Committee

Regular and Irregular Plural Nouns

Plural nouns are used to describe more than one person, animal, idea, thing or place. Many nouns are made plural by simply adding an -s at the end. However, irregular plural nouns don't follow that rule. Check out these examples:

Regular Plural

• Tiger = tigers
• Doctor = doctors
• Taco = tacos
• Desk = desks

Irregular Plural

• Man = men
• Foot = feet
• Mouse = mice
• Tooth = teeth

Possessive Nouns

Possessive nouns show ownership of something. You make a singular noun possessive by adding an 's at the end of the word. For plural words that already end with an s, you simply add the apostrophe. See examples below:

• The dog's bone
• The swimmer's trunks
• Tina's best friend
• The bakers' bread
• The banks' money

Pronouns

Pronouns take the place of a noun in a sentence. A pronoun can even take the place of another pronoun. Generally, you'll use pronouns to keep a sentence from sounding awkward or repetitive. Look at this sentence as an example of how to use pronouns:

Freddy decided that Freddy wanted to go to the store, but Freddy's mother stopped Freddy.

The sentence sounds funny and repetitive because no pronouns were used. Now, see how the sentence flows better when pronouns are substituted in several places for the noun 'Freddy'.

Freddy decided that he wanted to go to the store, but his mother stopped him.

As you can see, using pronouns improves how the sentence sounds. Similar to nouns, there are many different kinds of pronouns. Some of these types are described below along with examples.

Types of Pronouns

Subjective

Subjective pronouns refer to the subject of a sentence, which is usually the person or thing that is performing an action.

• I
• You
• She
• He
• It
• We
• They

Possessive

Similar to possessive nouns, possessive pronouns show ownership of something.

• Mine
• His
• Hers
• Theirs
• Its
• Ours

Indefinite

Indefinite pronouns are what you use when you want to refer to people or things that are identifiable but not specific.

• Many
• Each
• Everyone
• Everything

Reflexive

Reflexive pronouns are used to refer back to the subject of the sentence.

• Myself
• Herself
• Himself
• Yourself
• Ourselves

Verbs

Verbs in a sentence describe the action that occurs. Like nouns, if a verb is missing from a sentence, you actually have a fragment, not a complete sentence. The verbs tell you what the subject of the sentence is either doing, plans to do or has already done. Two common types of verbs you may encounter in your English homework are described below.

Regular

Regular verbs are put in past tense by adding -d or -ed on the end.

• Work = worked
• Talk = talked
• Love = loved
• Live = lived

Irregular

However, the past tense of an irregular verb is not formed by adding -d or -ed at the end of the word. The past tense of these verbs often looks quite different from their present tense.

• Eat = ate
• Blow = blew
• Be = was
• Freeze = froze