Last reviewed: 25 October 2026
Grammar questions are quick marks in an English paper if a learner knows the rules, and costly if they rely on what “sounds right”. This guide covers the grammar areas that come up most often for Grade 6, each with clear examples and the mistakes Kenyan learners commonly make.
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Tenses
Tense shows when an action happens.
- Simple present: habits and facts. “She walks to school every day.” “Water boils at 100°C.”
- Present continuous: happening now. “She is walking to school.”
- Simple past: finished actions. “She walked to school yesterday.”
- Past continuous: in progress in the past. “She was walking when it started to rain.”
- Present perfect: past action linked to now. “She has walked five kilometres today.”
- Future: “She will walk to school tomorrow.”
Time words are clues: “yesterday”, “last week” and “ago” point to the simple past; “already”, “just” and “since” often go with the present perfect.
Irregular Verbs
Many common verbs do not add -ed. Learn them in threes: go, went, gone; eat, ate, eaten; write, wrote, written; take, took, taken; begin, began, begun; bring, brought, brought; buy, bought, bought; teach, taught, taught. A frequent error is “He has went”. The correct form is “He has gone”, because “has” needs the third form.
Subject-Verb Agreement
A singular subject takes a singular verb; a plural subject takes a plural verb. “The boy plays” but “The boys play”. Watch for tricky subjects:
- “Each of the pupils has a book” (each is singular).
- “Neither Juma nor his sisters were late” (the verb agrees with the nearer subject).
- “The news is good” (news is singular).
Pronouns
Pronouns replace nouns. Subject pronouns (I, he, she, we, they) do the action; object pronouns (me, him, her, us, them) receive it. “Mary and I went home” is correct because you would say “I went home”. “The teacher praised Mary and me” is correct because you would say “praised me”. Possessive pronouns (mine, yours, his, hers, ours, theirs) never take an apostrophe: “The bag is hers”, not “her’s”.
Prepositions
Prepositions show position, time and direction. Common pairs that confuse learners:
- in, on, at for time: in March, in 2026; on Monday, on 12th June; at 8 o’clock, at night.
- between and among: between two people, among three or more.
- Fixed phrases: good at, afraid of, interested in, different from, married to, angry with a person.
A frequent local error is “I am coming to school by foot”. The correct phrase is “on foot”, though we say “by bus” and “by car”.
Adjectives and Comparison
Short adjectives add -er and -est: tall, taller, tallest. Longer ones use more and most: beautiful, more beautiful, most beautiful. Learn the irregular ones: good, better, best; bad, worse, worst; many, more, most; little, less, least. Never double up: “more taller” is wrong.
Punctuation
- Every sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark.
- Names of people, places, days and months take capital letters: Kisumu, Tuesday, October.
- Commas separate items in a list: “We bought rice, beans and sugar.”
- The apostrophe shows possession (“the girl’s bag”, “the girls’ bags”) or a shortened word (“don’t”, “it’s” for “it is”).
- Quotation marks enclose the exact words spoken: “Come here,” said Mother.
How to Practise
Short daily practice works better than one long session. Pick one area a day, write five sentences, and check them together. Reading aloud helps learners hear agreement errors. Pair this with our comprehension and cloze tips, then try the Grade 6 English revision papers. The exam countdown gives five free questions a day and the What to Revise report highlights weak areas. All full papers with marking guides are unlocked with the Monthly Pass (KSh 500 by M-Pesa).
Ten-minute check: try the free Grade 6 CBC Challenge. It has 10 questions, each marked on the spot with the working, and it shows which topics to practise next.