In elementary school, students learn that every sentence requires a subject and a verb. Elementary students tend to write short, choppy sentences. In middle school, students learn sentence composition by combining separate clauses with transition words and conjunctions. For example, the following sentences are two independent clauses, "I love walking. Walking is good for your health." You could combine these two sentences by inserting "and" or "because" and replacing the subject with an indirect pronoun such as "it." Then your sentence would read, "I love walking, and it is good for your health."
A basic rule with the conjunctions "and" as well as "but" is that a comma is used before the conjunction. The comma creates a pause in the sentence and joins the two independent clauses. However, using a word such as "because" does not require a comma because you are giving a reason for your initial independent clause. Therefore, the sentence would say read, "I love walking because it is good for your health."
In elementary school, students learn verbs in the present tense. For example, "I am walking to school." In middle school, students learn how to use various tenses. Students learn the past tense, which is used to describe something that has already happened. For instance, "I walked to school" describes an action that has already taken place. Middle school students also learn the future tense, which is used to describe something that has yet to take place. "I will walk to school" is an example of the future tense because I have not yet walked to school.
The subject of a sentence is usually a proper or common noun, or it may be a pronoun. A proper noun is the name of an individual or some other thing. In the sentence "James flew to England," James is the proper noun and subject of the sentence. A common noun is a generic term that describes the subject. For example, "The car is red." The common noun is "car" because the subject of the sentence is the car.
A pronoun is a word that replaces a proper or common noun after it has been used at least once. "James flew to England because James liked to travel." This is an example of two proper nouns describing the same person in one sentence. Since the reader already knows who the subject is, you can replace the second James with "he." Therefore, your sentence will read, "James flew to England because he liked to travel."
Adjectives are words that are used to describe nouns and pronouns. In the earlier example, "the car is red," the description of the car is the adjective. Therefore, "red" is the adjective because it describes what the car looks like.
Verbs are words that describe actions that have, are or will be taking place. Often you will want to describe how the action takes place. For example, if you enjoy playing dodgeball and you kick the ball past everyone on the field, you may want to say, "I kicked the ball well." The word "well" is the adverb because it describes how the ball was kicked. "Well" is not an adjective because it does not describe the actual ball; instead, it describes the action that was performed to the ball.