Adjectives Teaching Ideas and Worksheets

What are Adjectives? How are Adjectives Taught?

Adjectives are taught as early as grade 2 and for many grades beyond that. Adjectives are one of the parts of speech. An easy way to remember adjectives is to think of them as describing words, words that describe people, places, things, and feelings.

Here's my top ten list of how to help with the understanding of adjectives:

1. The Adjective Bag: Fill a plastic bag full of sensory items (cotton, putty, chalk, string, putty...) and take turns describing what the items feel like. Record this on chart paper or in notebooks.
2. Taste Tests:  Using 10 or so paper plates, put different foods on each plate, enough pieces for each child to try (celery, smarties, parsnips, licorice, rice cracker etc.) For each paper plate item, place a pencil and notepaper to allow each student to print an adjective about each item tasted. Students should be encouraged to print describing words about taste and / or texture.
3. My Family: Students make a list of their family members, under each member they will print describing words about their personality and looks.
4. Circle of Students: The students stand in a circle, the teacher or selected student begins by describing the person next to them with an adjective. For instance, student A says polite, the student who was described as polite says a word about the student beside them.....athletic, pleasant, nice, smart, funny, until the students run out of ideas.
5. Scavenger Hunt: The students go through newspapers and magazines to record as many adjectives as they can within a specific time period.
6. Nature Walk for Adjectives: Students take their clip boards and notebooks/pencils outside. They print the noun with an adjective or 2. For instance: sky - cloudy, temperature - warm, grass - wilted, bug - ugly. Come in after the nature walk and share as a group all the adjectives they came up with on the nature walk.
7. Adjectives in the Class: Much similar to the nature walk, students take 15 minutes to come up with nouns from the classroom and adjectives. For instance - books - many, chalkboard - dusty,  chairs - brown, blocks - broken.
8. Partner Brainstorm: Students work in pairs. One student states a noun and the partner students provides the adjective and then they trade after 10. For instance, partner 1 says apple, partner 2 says red, partner 1 says teacher, partner 2 says nice.
9.  Adjective Centres: Have a music centre where the students listen and describe the music, have centre with a variety of pictures of landscapes and have students describe them, have a center with a variety of movie titles and have students describe the movie and the characters, have a centre with pictures of cartoon characters and have students describe them.
10. Stretch the Sentence with Adjectives: The teacher provides a sentence and the students write it using an adjective. (Teacher: I saw a bird. Student: I saw a big, noisy bird.)

If you have other great ideas for helping with adjectives, please share. And be sure to check out all the adjective worksheets here. 

Me and You

Free Graphic Organizers

Have Your Students Compare Themselves To a Character

Have you read a book lately? Can you relate to one of the characters in the story? In what way? Do you think alike? Do you think alike? Do you dress alike? Do you act alike?

What makes you think that you are different than the character in the story? What makes you think you are like the character in the story?

This graphic organizer requires you to compare yourself with a character. It could be a character from a book or a movie. However, be sure to think socially, physically, emotionally and intellectually when you are comparing yourself with another.

If you find this worksheet helpful, be sure to share with a fellow educator.

Spring is in the air and if you haven't checked out the spring worksheets, you'll find them all right here. 

I'm off to determine which actor or book character I'm most like.
Have a great week educators!

Teaching and Learning About Nouns

What are Nouns?

Free Noun Teaching Unit

Nouns are a part of speech that refer to people, places, things and ideas. 

Nouns are taught as early as in kindergarten and typically not later than the 2nd grade. We teach children that nouns refer to people, places and things.  As they get a little older, it's important to teach them that nouns can also refer to ideas. Idea nouns things like: thoughts, dreams, courage, joy fantasy to name a few.  Personally, I like to break down nouns into each category when teaching children about nouns. For example:

Starting with people, I ask my students what they think their first words were. Of course they tell you Mom or Dad and then we start the discussion that nouns can name people. We then brainstorm all the people we know and come up with a list that looks something like:


People We Know
Mom,  dad, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, grandmother, grandfather, cousin, friends. From there, we make our own list of naming nouns that might include Sara, Jared, Sam etc.


Places
After that, we talk about places we've been. Sometimes they'll name say Dallas, Elizabeth Street or Niagara Falls and they are correct, but there are places like the store, the library, the school. We then talk about common and proper nouns. However, for the introduction of nouns, both proper and common nouns for naming places just fall under the category of places.

Naming Nouns of Places
Students then begin to brainstorm places: their street, favorite park, movie theaters, zoo, streets they've been on, countries, states, lakes, cities and towns they've been to.

(When students understand the concepts of nouns, we do a few activities to distinguish the difference between proper and common nouns - see the worksheets.)


Things
A quick look around stimulates the many different things.

Have your students go on a scavenger hunt to list as many nouns as they can. Once they have their list of nouns, it's time to classify them. You can list them as people, places, things and ideas or you can also list them as Common or Proper.

See all the worksheets on nouns here.
Stay tuned,  as we expand our categories of parts of speech to include adverbs, adjectives, preposition, verbs etc. 
Yours in learning....  Deb R

The Power of T Charts for Higher Level Thinking

Free T-Charts For Students

Haven't Used a T-Chart With Your Students?

It's time to start!

We've long known that graphic organizers are a great tool to promote both written work and higher level thinking. A simple T-Chart can be used with so many concepts and they are pretty easy for students to learn how to use them. A T Chart helps to organize to sides of thinking, they support making decisions, gathering facts, comparing and contrasting and analyze patterns to mention a few.

A T-Chart looks like it sounds, there is a topic and there is a left and right side to the T. Many different words can be used in the T-Chart headings. Here are just a few:

• Advantages / Disadvantages
• Pluses / Minuses
• +  /  -
• Pros / Cons
• For  /  Against
• Positive / Negative
• Agree / Disagree
• Favor / Oppose
• Thumbs up /  Thumbs Down

The topics are endless to use with T-Charts, here are a few to get you started:

• Homework
• Owning a Pet
• Longer Recess
• A pool in the school
• Uniforms at school
• Tablets for all students

This week, I've created a variety of T-Chart graphic organizers.  For a variety of T-Chart graphic organizers and topic ideas, you'll find everything you need right here.

How to Write a Sentence

Teaching Students to Write Sentences

To a large extent, writing sentences is somewhat innate when a child is read to or when a child reads.

The exposure to reading leads naturally to sentence writing.

As children first begin to write sentences, they will take the form of initial and final consonants for words strung together is 3-4 word sentences:

i  wnt owtsid  (I went outside)
i lk flrs (I like flowers)

It's important not to over correct as the child is taking a risk in writing and if you really think about it, they are more right than they are wrong.  The letters are the sounds they hear, they are simply missing more often than not the vowels. Vowels are later in the developmental sequence. If too much time is spent on correcting sentences like those above, the self esteem will be in jeopardy and the child won't take risks in writing which isn't what we want.

Provide many pictures and ask the child to write what they see. To extend the sentences, remember to use who, what, when, where, why and how.

FREE Sentence Writing Unit

This week, I focused on worksheets to support sentence writing.

These worksheets are suitable for early learning and will also help with students who have learning disabilities.

Ready, Set, Goal

Setting Goals Worksheets

Free Goal Setting Worksheets and Strategies

Teachers and educators, with the new year now here there is no better time to have your students set realistic goals for the upcoming new year and or term. Goal setting is a great activity that links to oral language standards and written language.  You'll find these SMART goal setting worksheets and some goal setting worksheets to be a great help for your students. They're done in graphic organizer style and easy to implement.

Another great activity to do with goal setting to ensure that goals are appropriately set is to use the W-5 plus how strategy. Students select a goal and then answer:

Who is responsible for the goal?
What is the goal?
When will the goal be reached?
Where will the goal be implemented?
Why is this goal important?
How will the goal be achieved?

Happy Goal Setting.  Thanks to all of our users and may your upcoming year be prosperous, happy and healthy!