He Go or He Goes? Why Children Drop (or Misplace) the S on Verbs

12 October 2026 · by Larry

Your child writes “My brother play football every Saturday.” Or the opposite: “My brothers plays football every Saturday.” You read it twice, because both look almost right, and you cannot quite say why the red pen came out.

This is subject–verb agreement, and it is a Primary 3 topic that catches children who are otherwise good at English. The rule is short. The trouble is that it asks the child to do a small check in the middle of writing a sentence, and a child writing quickly skips it.

The rule, in one line

When one person or thing does the action, the verb usually takes an s: she runs, my teacher reads, Ali plays. When more than one does it, the verb stays plain: they run, my teachers read, Ali and Siti play.

Notice where the s sits. It goes on the noun or on the verb, not on both. “My brother plays” and “my brothers play” are both correct. “My brothers plays” has the s twice, and “my brother play” has it nowhere. That odd see-saw is exactly what children find hard to hold in their heads.

Four slips that lose the same mark

Look through a few marked pieces and sort the errors. The mark lost is the same, but the cause is not.

• The missing s: “She walk to school.” The subject is one person and the verb has not changed. This is the most common one.
• The s on the wrong word: “My cousins visits us.” The child remembers that an s belongs somewhere and puts it on the verb because the noun already has one.
• Two names joined by “and”: “Ali and Siti plays chess.” Each name is one person, so the child reaches for the singular verb. Two people are doing it, so it is plural.
• The words in the middle: “The boys in my class likes pizza.” The verb has been matched to “class”, the nearest noun, instead of to “boys”, the real subject. The longer the gap, the more often this happens.

Sorting them matters because the help is different. Reminding a child to “add the s” makes the second slip worse. Practising short sentences will not fix the fourth, which only shows up when something sits between the subject and the verb.

Why a child who knows the rule still gets it wrong

Part of it is simply speed. The check is tiny, and a child who is thinking about what to say next does not stop to run it.

Part of it can be the language at home. In Mandarin, and in much of everyday Singlish, the verb does not change for who is doing it: “he go”, “she like”, “my mother cook” are perfectly clear in speech. In Standard English, the school page, the same sentence loses a mark. I am not saying that is the cause for your child. I am saying it is worth listening for. If she speaks the correct form but writes the wrong one, the knowledge is there and the writing is running ahead of it. If she says “he go” as well, the ear itself needs more practice, and the next section is for that.

The one question that fixes most of it

Teach the child to stop at the verb and ask: “Who is doing this — one, or more than one?”

That is all. One means the verb takes an s. More than one means it stays plain. For the fourth slip, add a second step: cover the words between the subject and the verb with a finger. “The boys in my class like pizza.” With the middle hidden, the right verb is obvious.

What helps

• Say it aloud. “She walk to school” usually sounds wrong to a child who has heard Standard English read aloud, even when it looks fine on the page. Reading it aloud turns an eye problem into an ear problem.
• Underline the doer, circle the verb. Two marks on a sentence, in a different colour from the text. It makes the pair visible, and the child can see whether they match.
• Fix it in her own sentences. A sentence from her own composition, with the mistake in it, teaches more than a worksheet of invented ones. She recognises her own voice and sees why it was marked.
• Read together, and notice. Most stories have a verb with an s on nearly every page. Pointing at one “he lives” in a book costs ten seconds.

What does not help

• Correcting every spoken slip at the dinner table. A child who is corrected constantly tends to say less. Save the correcting for the page.
• Telling her to “just remember the s”. The rule she needs is not “add an s”. It is “check who is doing it”.
• Long lists of verbs to copy out. The check is the skill, not the list.
• Treating it as carelessness. A child who writes “my brothers plays” has often just learned the rule and is applying it a little too hard, the same pattern described in why children write “goed” instead of “went”.

A five-minute check you can do at home

Read her five short sentences, one at a time, and ask her to say the verb with an s or without. You can make them up on the spot:

• My sister ___ (read) before bed.
• My sisters ___ (read) before bed.
• Mum and Dad ___ (cook) on Sundays.
• The girls in her class ___ (sing) very well.
• The boy next to the window ___ (draw) every day.

The answers are reads, read, cook, sing, draws. If she misses the first, the habit of checking is missing. If she misses the third, it is the “and” slip. If only the last two go wrong, it is the words in the middle, and the finger-over-the-gap trick is the thing to practise. Usually the page shows one pattern, not four, and that tells you where to put the next ten minutes.

One caution before you drill it further. Some verbs change more than an s: has and have, do and does, go and goes. They follow the same one-or-more-than-one idea, but they are worth looking at on their own once the plain ones are secure.

Where this fits in the school year

On StudyLab, subject–verb agreement is one of three Primary 3 English topics, alongside the simple past tense and joining words. The level-by-level guide describes the year as the point where English stops being one word at a time and becomes something you judge across the whole sentence, and this topic is a good example: you cannot see the mistake in the verb without looking at the subject.

When the verb is a blank in a passage, the same check applies: see the piece on grammar cloze.

If a few minutes of practice would help, the free English practice has a Subject & Verb topic where she picks the right form, and the answer comes with a one-line reason, such as “My brothers” is more than one, so the verb has no “s”. The English topics level by level shows what comes before and after. What each school expects in each year can differ, so check your child’s own workbook; the MOE primary English syllabus on moe.gov.sg is the official source.

And if she writes “my brothers plays” next week, take it as a good sign. She remembers there is an s somewhere. The next job is only to show her where it belongs.

Related: yesterday’s piece covers another slip that spelling tests cannot catch, their, there and they’re. And once the verbs are right, composition: when your child has nothing to write about is about what goes in the sentences.

Related: another small-word slip in writing is the choice of in, on or at for time, covered in in, on or at: why children mix up time words.

Related: the small joining words who and which feed straight into this, because “the boy who sits” needs the same check; see who, which or whose.