Prepositions Teaching Resources

If you're teaching preposition words, prepositional phrases, and common prepositions this school year, our teacher team has got your back. Say hello to printable worksheets, digital activities, and more teaching resources created by teachers and vetted by expert teachers to make teaching this part of the ELA curriculum a little bit easier!

Cut that lesson planning time with resources that can be easily edited to meet Common Core and state-level standards and a variety of options to differentiate instruction for your students' individual needs.

What Is a Preposition?

OK, maybe it's been a while since you were teaching students how to use prepositions. Our ELA teaching experts have put together this quick review to get you back in the mindset!

A preposition is the first part of a prepositional phrase that indicates the location of the object that is the subject of a sentence. Children begin to learn preposition/positional words in school as early as kindergarten, although they have likely used these location indicators even earlier without knowing it. Check out the collection for some examples of prepositions and exciting preposition activities for kids!

How to Teach Prepositions of Place

While some knowledge of prepositions comes along with daily conversation, it takes a bit of practice to master them. This is especially true for ESL learners. There are hundreds of ways to teach prepositions, all of them being effective in their own ways. Try out a few of these ideas for teaching your students about prepositions of place and positional words.

• Teach prepositions during group activities using resources like preposition worksheets, Google Interactive positional word activities, and clip cards.
• Play preposition games for kids. You can play Preposition Bingo, dominoes, or go Bowling for Prepositions!
• Try using positional language to teach prepositions with "I Spy" or "Search and Find" activities.
• Print or make a Prepositions Anchor Chart and use it as a classroom reference or instructional tool while your students complete a set of task cards or put together a preposition puzzle.
• Provide your students with the positional words they need to communicate by printing them a list of prepositions or a list of prepositional phrases.

If you teach upper grades, move out of simple prepositions and into prepositional phrases for 4th and 5th grades. You'll find prepositional phrase worksheets and games as well!

Some of the concepts can be daunting to teach, so now that you’ve got some options, make sure to check out the various worksheets, lesson plans, and prepositions of place exercises to plan even more preposition practice activities.