Parts of speech lessons focus on adjectives, adverbs, nouns, prepositions, pronouns and conjunctions. Lessons vary depending on the student's grade, such as learning only nouns and verbs to breaking down sentences into various parts which comes later in elementary school. These are the building components to reading and writing and are taught starting in first and second grade when students learn that a noun is a person, place, thing or idea and a verb is an action.
When writing a sentence, children need to know when to capitalize and what ending is most appropriate to use in a sentence. For example, students might learn that a period is the most common ending, and the beginning of a sentence is always capitalized. Teachers start explaining capitalization and endings in first grade when students are introduced to making a sentence. These skills are learned within the first year or two of elementary school.
Beyond the basics of putting a period at the end of a sentence, students in elementary school start learning about commas, colons, semi-colons, quotation marks, hyphens and similar punctuation skills. These lessons often carry through to high school and college, but the lessons start in elementary school, often around the time students start learning to write essays, typically in third or fourth grade.
Teachers giving lessons in grammar have a few methods of teaching the lessons. Teachers can use books to show sentence construction and structure, worksheets to give students an activity that is also a lesson, play games or work on coloring sheets. Most teachers use a variety of methods.