🏁 Some words look like they should have an apostrophe but they don’t!
These ones already tell us that something belongs to them, so you don’t need an apostrophe: ours, yours, hers, its and theirs.
Here are some examples:
The car is theirs and its wheels are damaged.
We bought the house and at last 42 Rose Gardens is ours!
The kids are mine when they’re good and yours when they’re naughty!
The phone is mine but the ring is hers.
The most common mistake is with its.
📲 💻You can use this link to a Google Form so you can test you’ve got it.
🔆 Okay with this now? Then go to Skill 19.
🛠 Need more help or advice? Read on.
🎯 📝 To help remember these, rewrite the correct version of the words below. Be careful: all the apostrophes are wrong and need to be removed!
The dog wagged it’s tail, drank from it’s bowl and then slept on it’s mat.
The house is their’s, the car is their’s, and the gardens are their’s, but the land opposite is our’s.
After scoring three times, the trophy was rightfully their’s.
The keys are mine, the phone is her’s and the wallet is your’s.
✅ The sentences should look like this really:
The dog wagged its tail, drank from its bowl and then slept on its mat.
The house is theirs, the car is theirs, and the gardens are theirs, but the land opposite is ours.
After scoring three times, the trophy was rightfully theirs.
The keys are mine, the phone is hers and the wallet is yours.
Once you’ve learned the words that don’t need apostrophes, you’re almost there with this set of skills, with just the last couple of confusing things to clear up in the next skills.
🚦 Time for more?
This is often a bit confusing for people, so you might just have to learn these ones. The its word is usually confused with it’s (which always just means it is), so it will probably help if you do the exercises above to get them in your memory. There are more of these types of words, but it’s just the ones above that end in -s that can give people problems.
🎓 These words are called possessive pronouns.