Grammar Tests for 6th Grade Students: Prep and Practice Info

What Grammar Topics Should My 6th Grader Study?

When students are in 6th grade, they learn about parts of speech and punctuation during grammar units. While they probably already know about nouns, verbs and adjectives, most teachers will conduct a comprehensive review of these parts of speech.

In 6th grade, students also learn how to use and identify adverbs. There may be fill-in-the-blank questions on exams where teachers provide a sentence with a missing word and students must determine what part of speech is missing and select a word that fits in the sentence.

Finally, 6th graders study punctuation. Teachers often review the use of commas and test this skill by adding sentences without punctuation to tests, requiring students to correctly insert the proper punctuation. Help your child prepare with the three activities below.

Three Grammar Activities

Part of Speech Identification

One exercise your child can complete for extra grammar practice is identifying and labeling each word in a sentence with the proper part of speech, including subject, verb, noun, adjective, article and adverb. There are several worksheets and interactive versions of this activity online, but if you choose, you can create your own fairly quickly by typing or writing a few sentences for your child to work with.

Homophone Selection

One aspect of language arts that many students struggle with is homophones, or words that sound the same but are spelled differently. For this activity, first select several grade-appropriate homophone vocabulary terms. Then, create sentences, leaving the homophone out. Provide your child a list of words to choose from to give him or her practice with the proper spellings and definitions. For example, your sentence might be, 'Before each wrestling match, we must _ in.' Your child will select from the options 'whey,' 'way' and 'weigh.'

Proofreading

A great way for students to gain experience with proper grammar is to spend time proofreading others' work. If they're not writing it from scratch, it may be easier for them to be critical and provide thorough review. If you want to do this activity at home, simply search the Internet for proofreading worksheets or type up your own with purposeful errors in punctuation, word usage and sentence structure to see how well your child can correct them.