Copyright © 2007 by Jewels Educational Services

A sentence is a group of words that expresses a

complete thought.

But, in order to express a complete thought, a sentence has to be about something. In other words, it has to have a subject.

However, even if a sentence has a subject, it still needs something else to express a complete thought. That's because the subject in the sentence cannot do anything, have anything, or be anything without something called a predicate.

And of course, sentences always begin with a capital letter and end with some type of punctuation mark -- either a period, question mark, or exclamation point.

Now that we've covered the basics, let's take a look at a few groups of words and see if we can recognize the ones that express complete, coherent thoughts (the ones that make sense) and which ones do not.

Go to the skillwise activity at www.bbc.net.uk and see if you can spot which of the groups of words forms a real sentence.

        WHAT IS A SENTENCE?

1a.

• The subject of a sentence is the person or the thing that is either doing something, having something, or being something in the sentence. Hence, the subject is the person or the thing the sentence is about.
  

• The predicate tells you what the subject of a sentence is, does, or has.
  

ENGLISH/LANGUAGE ARTS LESSON

Part 1ASENTENCES