Sentence Types Teaching Resources

Teach the types of sentences in your ELA classes with printable worksheets, writing activities and more teacher-created and curriculum-aligned teaching resources!

Our teacher team has created this extensive collection of teaching resources to help students understand how to create various sentence types from simple to compound-complex and use the proper punctuation. Aligned to the Common Core curriculum, the ELA collection includes editable worksheets and teaching presentations and more to save teachers time on lesson planning.

Created by expert teachers, each resource in this grammar collection has been carefully reviewed and curated by our team. That means it's ready to use in the classroom! You'll even find editable resources, plus differentiated options.

New to teaching sentence types, or just looking for fresh ways to engage your students? Read on for a primer from our teaching team!

What Are the 4 Types of Sentences?

So what types of sentences do kids typically learn about in elementary school, and why do they matter? It's often said there are four basic types, and it's technically true. But the four types you're teaching will depend on the grade level you're teaching!

Sentence Types for Early Elementary

Students younger than fourth grade will typically learn one batch of sentence types, broken out by their function and punctuation type.

Declarative Sentences

Declarative sentences make statements or express facts, opinions, or information. This sentence type also ends with a period.

Interrogative Sentences

An interrogative sentences asks questions.  They end with a question mark and start with either an auxiliary verb or one of the following question words:

• What
• When
• Why
• Where
• Who
• How

Imperative Sentences

An imperative sentence gives commands, instructions, or requests. They can be phrased in a way that sounds polite or forceful. Imperative sentences usually lack a subject because the pronoun you is implied.

Exclamatory Sentences

The final type of sentence taught at this grade level is exclamatory. These convey strong emotions, surprise, excitement or emphasis. They often begin with "What" or "How" and end with an exclamation mark.

Sentence Types for Upper Elementary

Older students learn more complex sentence types, including a type that's literally named complex!

Simple Sentence

A simple sentence contains one independent clause and expresses a complete thought.

A good starting point for teaching sentence types, these sentences all contain a subject and a predicate, and they provide the foundation for understanding the basic structure of a sentence.

Compound Sentence

Compound sentences contain two or more independent clauses, and a coordinating conjunction joins them together. This type offers an entrance into discussing the different comma rules, as compound sentences always need a comma inserted before the conjunction.

Teaching compound sentences also allows students to explore relationships between ideas by connecting two or more independent clauses, and expressing contrasting, additive or causal relationships.

Complex Sentence

A complex sentence contains one independent clause and at least one dependent clause.

This type not only helps students better understand the difference between independent and dependent clauses, but it can help kids better understand subordination. With complex sentences, students learn to express cause and effect and conditionality in their writing.

Compound-Complex Sentence

A sentence that contains two or more independent clauses and at least one dependent clause is considered a compound-complex sentence.

These help our students express more intricate relationships between ideas.