Grammar and punctuationGrades 1–3
Verbs worksheets
Each row holds one sentence and the student circles its verb. Sentences use clear action words such as baked, planted and kicked. Aimed at grades 1 to 3, with an answer key.
- Fresh problems every time
- Answer key on its own page
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On this page
An action word hunt
Verbs are the engine of a sentence, and for beginners the easiest ones to find are the ones you can act out. This worksheet leans on that. Every sentence has a clear action, and the instructions describe a verb as an action word that tells what someone or something did.
What prints
One sentence sits in each row of a single column, with generous space for a circle. Examples from the bank are "The cat slept on the warm blanket", "Owen kicked the ball over the fence" and "The farmer fed the cows and the pigs". Most use past tense, though a few use the present, such as "My sister plays soccer every Tuesday".
Questions built on helping verbs (Did Leo see the rainbow, Can we go to the beach) are deliberately kept off this version. They would make the task about two-word verb phrases, which is a later step. For the same reason, you will not find sentences where the answer is "is" or "have".
The answer key reprints each sentence with a colored underline under the verb.
The settings
- Skill opens on "Find the verbs". The same menu switches to the nouns, rewrite, capitalization and end punctuation sheets.
- Number of problems accepts 6 to 14, and the starting value is 12.
- Pick the paper size and decide on the answer key when you download.
Worked example: Priya's letter
Here is the item "Priya wrote a letter to her grandpa."
- Read it aloud and ask what Priya did. She wrote. That is the action.
- Check by acting it out. Can you "letter" something? No. Can you "wrote"? Yes, you pretend to write in the air.
- Circle "wrote". Leave "letter" and "grandpa" alone, since those are the nouns.
For "Our class planted beans in small cups," the question is the same: what did the class do? They planted. Children sometimes circle "beans" because it is the thing being planted, and the answer key is helpful for showing the difference.
A nice twist is to ask children to change the tense. "Priya writes a letter to her grandpa" uses the same verb in a new form. Talking about the changed spelling of wrote and writes introduces tense without needing a lesson.
Adding variety
If a child finds the exercise easy, ask them to swap the verb for a stronger one, such as "tossed" for "kicked" or "mailed" for "wrote", and read the new sentence together. It shows how much a single word matters.
When you have used this page for a week or two, give nouns worksheets a try so the child can compare which word names a thing and which one acts. For writing full sentences from scratch, rewrite the sentence worksheets put punctuation and capitals to work.