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Grammar
- 1-5 Years
- 5-11 Years
- 11-19 Years
- Speech, language and communication
Children start learning grammar from an early age. The more children hear grammar used correctly in everyday speech, the easier it is for them to learn and use it themselves.
Parents and carers can use this information at home to support their child. Education staff can also use this information with children in their school or setting.
Please try these ideas and advice before making a referral to the Speech and Language Therapy Service.
Explore the topics on this page:
How children develop their grammar
From a young age, children start to learn the rules of grammar and gain knowledge of concepts. As they develop, this learning becomes more complex. For example, they begin to understand:
- pronouns, like he/she, his/her, their, “she is running”
- negatives, using words such as ‘no’ or ‘not’, “he is not eating the apple”
- prepositions, like in, on, under, behind, next to, “the ball is under the table”
- comparatives, like, big, bigger, biggest, “the elephant is bigger than the mouse”
- concepts, used to describe a range of ideas including size, colour, number, shape, time, personal qualities, “Yesterday Sam had a big red balloon”
- regular and irregular plurals, “the ducks and geese are swimming”
- past, present and future verb tenses, “they walked up the hill”
The more children hear grammatical features of words and sentences, the easier it is for them to understand what they mean and how to use them.
Strategies to support grammar
- Model language in real situations - Children learn new words and sounds by hearing them modelled by the people around them. Read more about modelling.
- Offer choices - Try to offer the child 2 choices if they are unsure. For example, “Is it mouses or mice?”.
- Encourage self-checking - Support the child to listen to their own speech and notice if it makes sense.
- Use visual supports - Use colourful semantics or a similar approach to help them build sentences and understand sentence structure.
Last reviewed: 24 November, 2025
