KS2 SATs 2016 — English GPS Paper 1: Questions

The idea

GPS Paper 1 often asks you to circle, underline or tick a word class, so this unit focuses on nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, determiners, prepositions and conjunctions. The golden rule is that a word's class depends on its job in that sentence, not on the word itself.

Nouns name things, verbs do or be, adjectives describe nouns and adverbs mostly describe verbs. Pronouns replace nouns, determiners introduce nouns ('the', 'a', 'my', 'three'), prepositions show position or time, and conjunctions join.

Work through a sentence word by word, asking 'what is this word doing here?' That question answers almost every word-class item on the paper. Determiners and pronouns are the pair that children confuse most often, so learn the tests for those two especially well before the paper.

Worked example

In the sentence 'The small dog barked loudly at the postman', what word class is 'small', and what word class is 'loudly'?

1. 'Small' describes the noun 'dog', so it is an adjective.
2. 'Loudly' describes how the dog barked — it adds information to the verb, so it is an adverb.
3. Sanity check: 'dog' and 'postman' are nouns, 'barked' is a verb, 'the' is a determiner and 'at' is a preposition.

Answer: 'Small' is an adjective and 'loudly' is an adverb.

Watch out

• Classifying a word by what it usually is, instead of the job it does in this sentence.
• Confusing adjectives and adverbs — check whether the word describes a noun or a verb.