Search Preposition Educational Resources

A preposition is the first part of a prepositional phrase that indicates location. Children begin to learn preposition words in school as early as kindergarten, although they have likely used these location indicators even earlier without knowing what they were called. For some examples of prepositions, refer to the bottom of this page or dive in to our educational resources.

Prepositions are a quick way to say where or when something happened or is happening. We have provided some common examples of prepositions below:

Above	Beside	In back of	Outside
After	Between	Inside	Since
Around	Down	Next	Up
Before	During	Off	Upon
Beneath	In	On	Within

Once you have an understanding of what words are considered prepositions, you can then start to build prepositional phrases. Prepositional phrases are composed of a preposition, a noun or pronoun object of the preposition, and an optional modifier of the object.

• Before midnight: “Before” is the preposition, “midnight” is the object of the preposition, and there is no modifier
• On the desk: “On” is the preposition, “desk” is the object of the preposition, and “the” is a modifier
• To school: “To” is the preposition, “school” is the object of the preposition, and there is no modifier

To learn more about making and recognizing prepositional phrases, try out our resources here. Prepositions can be confusing, so now that you’ve been introduced to the different ways to describe location both in the physical world and in time, check out the various worksheets, lessons plans, and exercises on our page to get more practice in using prepositions!