Grammar5 min readEnglish and ESL teachers

Prepositions Exercises With Answers (Free Printable Practice)

Free prepositions exercises with answers: where to find printable PDFs by level, what to check before class, and how to turn them into a quick class check.

Written for English and ESL teachers. Published 2026-08-20. Updated 2026-08-20.

Prepositions are one of the hardest things for English learners to get right, and teachers want practice that's printable today with a clear answer key. This page lists trusted free sources, what to check before printing, and how to adapt a generic worksheet to your class.

What makes prepositions worth testing carefully

Prepositions are tricky because so many uses are fixed rather than rule-based. A student can know that 'in' means inside and still say 'good in maths' or 'depend of'. That's why gap-fill practice on the exact collocations you taught beats a general rules quiz.

Before downloading anything, decide what you're practising: prepositions of place and time, prepositions of movement, or dependent prepositions after verbs and adjectives. A set that mixes all of them is good for review but overwhelming as first practice.

Where to find free prepositions PDFs with answer keys

These sources hold up over years of classroom use and don't hide the answer key behind an email wall:

  • Perfect English Grammar — focused preposition PDFs by type, each with a key
  • British Council LearnEnglish — level-tagged preposition practice with short explanations
  • agendaweb.org — a large index of printable preposition exercises sorted by topic and level
  • ISLCollective — peer-shared preposition worksheets, most with answer keys
  • Cambridge English sample papers — free official PDFs where prepositions appear in exam-style tasks

What to check before you print

Open the answer key first. Prepositions often allow more than one natural answer ('at the weekend' vs 'on the weekend' in different varieties of English), so confirm the key matches what you teach and flag items where you'll accept alternatives.

Then read a few items out loud. Free worksheets sometimes test dated or region-specific usage; cross those out before printing. Finally, match the level — beginners need place and time first, dependent prepositions belong at B1 and above.

Turning a worksheet into a quick class check

A worksheet gives students the answers but doesn't show you who understood. If you want that, take five or six sentences from your own lesson — the exact collocations you taught — and run them as a short quiz at the end of class.

Because the questions come from what you covered, the results are specific: if most of the class misses 'interested ___', you know exactly which dependent preposition to reteach before moving on.

Turn Your Prepositions Practice Into a Quick Quiz

Paste a few sentences from your lesson into LessonCue and get a short, ready-to-share quiz in seconds. Students join with a 6-digit code — no account needed.

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Quick answers

What level are prepositions usually taught at?

Prepositions of place and time (in, on, at) start at A1–A2, but prepositions of movement, dependent prepositions (interested in, good at), and phrasal-style uses run all the way to B2–C1. Match the PDF's level to where your class actually is.

Why are prepositions so hard for learners?

They rarely map one-to-one between languages, and many uses are fixed rather than logical (you're 'on' a bus but 'in' a car). Good exercises test the specific collocations you taught, not just the general rule.

How many preposition questions should a practice set have?

For focused practice, 15–20 items is plenty. For a mixed review across place, time, and dependent prepositions, keep it to 20–25 so students finish inside one lesson.

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