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Important update from TheSchoolRun

For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.

What this means for subscribers:

  • Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
  • In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
  • As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.

A few changes to be aware of:

  • The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
  • The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.

*If you need to reset your password, it will still work as usual. Please check your spam folder if the reset email doesn’t appear in your inbox.

What are definite and indefinite articles?

What are definite and indefinite articles?
Definite (the) and indefinite (a, an) articles explained for primary school parents, with examples of how they will be taught in primary-school grammar lessons.

What are definite and indefinite articles?

Articles are words which tell us whether a noun is general (any noun) or specific. There are three articles:
 

  1. the (specific or definite)
  2. a (general or indefinite)
  3. an (general or indefinite when followed by a noun which begins with a vowel)

For example:

The indefinite article 'a' (in red) tells us that the person who wrote the sentence was seeing the cat for the first time.

In this sentence:

The definite article 'the' (in red) tells us that this was a cat that had been seen before, or was known by the person writing the sentence.

The definite article is referring to a specific noun, whereas the indefinite article is referring to something more general, for example:

This means the person speaking wants any book, they are not referring to a specific one.


In this sentence, the speaker wants a particular book.

 

Use of definite and indefinite articles in primary-school texts

Often, in a story, a person or thing will be introduced using the indefinite article and then afterwards will be referred to with the definite article. For example:

First, 'a witch' is used because the witch has not been seen before. Then 'the witch' is used because she has already been introduced and can therefore be referred to with the definite article.

How children are taught about articles in primary school

Articles are determiners, words which come at the beginning of the noun phrase and tell us whether the noun phrase is specific or general. According to the primary curriculum, revised in 2014, children should be taught correct grammatical terminology, so they will learn that articles are one of many different kinds of determiners.