Tips to help your child improve sentence structures & tenses at home

Ready, set, go! Here are some tips to help P3 & P4 students ace their English at school!

The Primary 3 and 4 years are essential in building a strong grammatical foundation. Ideally, students should have begun this journey in their P3 year with consistent practice in grammar exercises and writing practices. However, students in the Primary 4 year are still able to catch up by paying close attention to their grammar this year. Students who have undergone Continuous Assessments (CAs) or Written Assignments (WAs) can identify their weaker areas and start working on those areas with their tutors or with their parents at home.

As our P3s and P4s write on a weekly basis, we are able to identify and correct sentence structures and grammatical mistakes consistently. So, how can parents help their children at home in a fun way?

How do we improve our sentence structures?

Most students do not have problems with simple sentence structures. The confusion begins when the student adds modifiers to the sentences. A modifier enhances a sentence by adding details, such as adjectives or adverbs to describe nouns or pronouns more vividly.

In Primary 3 & 4, grammar tests or exercises are usually in the form of multiple-choice questions or underlining the correct answer. If a student does not write compositions regularly in school, parents rarely see how adept their children are in their sentence structures until their P3 SA2 examinations. In primary 4, they begin to write emails and longer compositions that require the use of more modifiers and subordinate conjunctions etc.

How you can help your child at home:

1. Expand Sentences Using the 5Ws and 1H

Encourage students to add details by asking Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How questions.

• Example:
  • Basic: The boy runs.
  • Expanded: The energetic boy runs quickly in the park every morning to train for his race.

2. Use Connectors to Join Ideas

Teach students to use connectors (e.g., because, so, but, and, then, although, since) to combine ideas smoothly.

• Example:
  • Basic: I was hungry. I ate a sandwich.
  • Improved: I was hungry, so I ate a sandwich.

3. Vary Sentence Starters

Help students avoid starting all sentences the same way. Use different beginnings, such as:

• Adverbs: Suddenly, the door slammed shut.
• Prepositional phrases: In the morning, I went for a walk.
• -ing phrases: Running quickly, he reached the finish line.

4. Rearrange and Edit Sentences

Give students jumbled words or incomplete sentences and ask them to rearrange or rewrite them correctly.

• Example:
  • Jumbled words: a / sings / beautiful / song / the / girl
  • The girl sings a beautiful song.

5. Read and Imitate Good Sentences

Encourage reading books, model essays, and well-written sentences. Ask students to copy and modify sentence structures from stories.

• Example:
  • Book sentence: The sun shone brightly in the clear blue sky.
  • Student’s version: The moon glowed softly in the dark night sky.

How do we improve our tenses?

In Primary 3 & Primary 4, many students still make mistakes in their tenses. This should be nipped in the bud before they reach Primary 5. We consistently correct our students’ tense mistakes in these two years and remind them to build good habits when writing by checking their tenses.

Practising Multiple-choice questions is also a great way for students to learn from their mistakes and practice consistently their tenses.

How you can help your child at home:

1. Identify and Practise Common Verb Forms

Students should practise the different forms of verbs in past, present, and future tenses. Create verb charts to help them see patterns.

• Example:
  • Present: She runs to school.
  • Past: She ran to school.
  • Future: She will run to school.

2. Look for Time Clues in Sentences

Teach students to look for time words (e.g., yesterday, now, tomorrow, last week, next month) to decide which tense to use.

• Example:
  • Yesterday, she ate lunch at 1 p.m. (Past tense)
  • Tomorrow, she will eat lunch at 1 p.m. (Future tense)

3. Use Consistent Tenses in a Story

Students often mix tenses in a passage. Encourage them to stick to one main tense when writing stories or essays.

• Example (Incorrect):
  • She wakes up, brushed her teeth, and will eat breakfast.
• Example (Correct – Past Tense):
  • She woke up, brushed her teeth, and ate breakfast.

4. Read Aloud and Self-Check

Encourage students to read their sentences aloud to see if they sound right. They can also check by asking:

• Does the sentence make sense in the time I am describing?
• Are all verbs in the same tense?

5. Create some fun games

There are some fun ways to practice tenses with your child at home. Focus on irregular verbs as they are the more difficult ones for children to remember.

Make it a card game just like Snap and select irregular verbs that your child do not know. Create one deck of cards for verbs in the present tense and one for verbs in the past tense.

Keep the decks of cards separated and shuffle each well. The game is played like Snap.

Turn the top card on the present tense deck (black and white cards) over so each player can read it. Leave it face up.
Now begin turning the colored (past tense) cards over one at a time, forming a pile. The player has to spot the past tense version (e.g. left) of the present tense verb (e.g. leave) and slap the card first to win the game.

By integrating these fun and interactive methods into home learning routines, parents can effectively support their children in mastering grammar and tense usage during their crucial early years of education. Here are some samples of cards that you can download and print at home:

You can download the PDF version of the cards from this blog or feel free to create your own with more irregular verbs.

Check our full library of resources on English Paper 2 for Primary 4 students to get more tips and free advice.