Subject And Predicate Worksheets With Answer Keys
I used to hand out grammar worksheets to kids who'd rather be anywhere else. After about three years of grading the same sentence diagrams over and over, I learned which ones actually work and which ones just look good on Pinterest. Most of the time the answer keys are wrong or the instructions are contradictory. You need to know what to look for before you print anything. A subject is what the sentence is about. The predicate tells what the subject does or is. Everything after that is nuance and variation. Simple enough until you get to compound subjects, elliptical predicates, and sentences where the subject doesn't show up where you expect it. That is when worksheets become a problem. I found this out with a class of sixth graders. I handed out a worksheet asking students to identify the complete subject and the simple predicate. One of the sentences was "Running through the park is my favorite way to start the day." The subject is not "Running through the park" in the way most worksheets treat it. It is a gerund phrase functioning as a subject, and the predicate is "is my favorite way to start the day." A lot of commercially available worksheets mark the answer differently depending on who wrote it. Some say the subject is just "Running." Others break it apart incorrectly. I stopped trusting the answer keys without checking them first.
The workaround I use now is to write my own key or cross-reference at least three versions before assigning a worksheet. It takes about ten minutes per sheet instead of thirty minutes of correcting confused students later. Here is what most people miss when they pick worksheets. The distinction between simple subject and complete subject matters for instruction but gets messy fast. A sentence like "The very tall boy in the red jacket who sits in the back row won the award" has a simple subject of "boy." The complete subject runs the whole thing. Worksheets often conflate the two or present them as interchangeable. They are not interchangeable and tests will penalize students for mixing them up. Another thing that slips past teachers. Predicates are not always single verbs. Modern grammar treats the verb phrase as the core of the predicate, including auxiliary verbs, modal verbs, and any complements or modifiers that belong to the verb group. A worksheet that asks students to circle just the main verb when the predicate is "has been waiting" is using outdated terminology. It creates confusion at the middle school level where students have not yet encountered aspect and tense systematically.
When I build my own worksheets I organize by difficulty in this order. First, simple sentences with one clear subject and one clear predicate. Then sentences with linking verbs where the predicate contains a subject complement instead of an action. Then sentences with helping verbs where the full verb phrase needs to be identified. After that I introduce compound subjects and compound predicates, because those are where students usually stumble. Finally I add inverted sentences and introductory phrases that hide the subject, like "Yesterday in the garage we found the old toolbox." The subject is "we," not "toolbox" or "garage." That one causes problems consistently. For answer keys, I make them separate documents. Students should not see the answers while working. I format the key so each item shows the full sentence with the subject underlined and the predicate bracketed, followed by a brief note when the answer is non-obvious. Notes like "gerund phrase as subject" or "inverted order" help students who look at the key afterward and try to understand why they got it wrong. The biggest limitation of subject and predicate worksheets is that they do not teach application. Identifying parts of a sentence in isolation does not transfer well to writing. A student can underline the subject correctly on paper and still write run-on sentences with no subject at all. If your goal is just identification practice, worksheets work fine for about twenty minutes a week. If your goal is actually improving student writing, you need to pair them with sentence combining exercises and short editing tasks. I usually follow a worksheet with a short paragraph where students rewrite sentences that are missing subjects or have weak predicates. That doubles the instructional value without adding much time.
Get the Full Details
Free resources exist online but quality varies wildly. Some sites recycle the same twelve sentences with minor number changes. Others produce content that would confuse a linguist. The safest approach is to use a couple of vetted worksheets as a base, then edit them to match your curriculum scope and sequence. I keep a running Google Doc with versions I have tested, including the date I used them, which class I used them with, and how many students got each question wrong. Over a few years this becomes a more useful resource than any download you will find. If you need something ready to go right now, the Teachers Pay Teachers store with the highest consistent rating for these worksheets is the one run by a middle school ELA teacher who posts updates every semester. The free samples on Education.com are passable but you will want the paid bundles if you are doing this for an entire year. Both have answer keys, but I still check them. The cost is usually less than an hour of your time spent fixing problems after the fact. The bottom line is that these worksheets are a tool, not a curriculum. They fill a gap in early grammar instruction and they give students practice with sentence anatomy. They are not going to fix bad writing habits on their own. Use them for targeted practice, verify the answer keys, and move students to application as quickly as possible.
