Pronouns

Pronouns can be used in place of nouns and noun phrases. There are numerous subcategories of pronouns, including reflexive pronouns, possessive, relative pronouns, and many more.

To ensure students understand the differences between different pronoun types, you may want to break lesson plans down into a separate lesson for each type. Education.com’s activities and lesson plans below outline each type of pronoun for both students and teachers.

Because there are many types of pronouns, it helps to understand each type and their purpose. Typically, pronouns are anaphoric, or their meaning depends on the word or phrase preceding them.

The different types of pronouns are described below:

• Personal pronouns: one of the most common types. The chart below will help your students understand when and why they use different personal pronouns, located in the far-right column.



Person	Number	Case
		Subject	Object
First	Singular	I	me
	Plural	we	us
Second	Singular	you
	Plural
Third	Singular	he	him
		she	her
		it
	Plural	they	them



• Reflexive and reciprocal pronouns: used for when someone or something commits an action upon itself. For example: “The boy hit himself.”
• Possessive pronouns: reveal whether something is owned or not. They can occur both independently (mine, yours, hers, ours, yours, theirs), and dependent on nouns (my, your, her, our, your, their). Interestingly, both ‘his’ and ‘its’ can be both independent and dependent.
• Demonstrative pronouns: ‘this, that,’ and their plural forms ‘these, those.’ They point out position, and may or may not be anaphoric.
• Indefinite pronouns refer to people or things that are not defined. They are the biggest group of pronouns, and distributive, negative, and impersonal pronouns.
• Relative pronouns: refer back to things already mentioned, and include: who, whom, whose, what, which and that.
Set your students up with worksheets and games above to give them ample practice and develop their understanding of the many different types of pronouns.