By Kristopher Majak

 A noun is a person, place, thing or idea

 Proper nouns are specific. We capitalize proper nouns.  Carlos kicked the ball to Miguel.  Common nouns are not specific. We leave common nouns lower case unless they begin a sentence.  Carlos kicked the ball to Miguel.

 A pronoun is a word that is used in place of one or more nouns or pronouns.  I, me, my, mine, we, us, our, ours, you, your, yours, he, him, his, she, her, hers, its, it, they, them, their, theirs, myself, ourselves, yourself, yourselves, himself, herself, itself, themselves, this, that, these, those, who, whom, which, what, whose, all, another, any, anybody, anyone, anything, both, each, either, everyone, everything, few, many, more, most, much, neither, nobody, no one, nothing, one, other, several, some, somebody, something, such  Gabe turned in his homework today.  The word that a pronoun replaces is called an antecedent.  Gabe turned in his homework today.

 An adjective is a word that is used to describe a noun or a pronoun.  The warm, gooey, delicious pizza.

 An article lets you know whether you are talking about something in particular or something in general.  A, an, the  *use an before a word starting with a vowel.  I bought an orange at the store.  We returned the movie to the store.

 An adverb describes a verb, adjective, and adverb.  Adverbs normally end in “ly”  He sang beautifully.  The rain fell softly.

 A verb is a word used to express action or a state of being.  A verb phrase consists of at least one main verb and one or more helping verbs.  Helping verbs: can, could, do, did, does, had, has, have, may, shall, should, will, would.  The boy is leaving for Texas tomorrow.  She should not have borrowed that necklace.

 A preposition shows time and place. Without prepositions, you wouldn’t be able to show relationships between words.  Aboard, about, above, across, after, against, along, amid, among, around, as, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, besides, between, beyond, by, concerning, down, during, except, for, from, in, inside, into, like, near, of, off, on, onto, out, outside, over, past, since, through, throughout, till, to, toward, under, underneath, until, up, upon, with, within, without

 A conjunction is a word that joins words or groups of words.  For, and, nor, but, or, yet, so  Jim wrote down the number, but he lost it.  I do work at home and at school.

 An interjection is a word that expresses emotion. It has no relation to the rest of the sentence.  Ah, aha, oh boy, hey, hurrah, oh, whoops, ouch, whew, yikes, yippee

 Read each of the sentences below. Then identify the part of speech of each word.  1.We rode on the subway.  2.The sun was up when we left the house.  3. Ernesto lives a few miles up the coast.