Focus on these key areas when teaching adjectives to your students.

What is an adjective?
Adjectives are the words we use to add detail to a noun. Adjectives give the reader more information.
To explore this students could do any of the following activities:

Read three nursery rhymes and write out the adjectives (Mary had a little lamb, Humpty Dumpty had a big fall)

Look for adjective -noun groups in books the class has already been reading - photocopy a page for each student and then ask them to highlight the nouns and the adjectives.

Read any paragraph and write out the adjectives

Choose 5 adjectives and use each one in a sentence

How do you think of adjectives to use when you're writing?
Students may understand what an adjective is but struggle with thinking of a descriptive word to use when writing.
The following activities will give them practice doing this:

Draw a picture of a monster and write 10 adjectives that could be used to describe it.

Write a noun in the middle of a page and write adjectives that could be used to describe it. Asking questions is a good way to come up with ideas. Who owns it? What is it for? How old is it? Where is it? Where did it come from? What does it sound like? What does it smell like? What is it similar to?

Write one adjective on a page. Write down three adjectives that mean a similar thing (pretty, beautiful, lovely). Now write down three adjectives that mean the opposite (ugly, unpleasant, yucky).

Write your own lists of adjectives. Write 7 for each kind - color, size, taste, touch, and number. Now swop adjectives with other students. Aim to collect another 3 adjectives for each group.

How can you get better at using adjectives?.
Manipulating adjectives and connecting them with familiar ideas helps strengthen a student's ability to use them when writing.
The following activities provide opportunities for your students to do this:

Take a list of 10 or 20 adjectives from any source and reorganize them into groups. Decide the types of groups yourself. You could group the adjectives into positive and negative. You could group the adjectives into ones that describe people and ones that describe other things. You could group the adjectives into temperature, size, texture and color.

Make a set of twenty cards and write double sets of adjectives on them. Play memory with the cards.

Write 5 words to describe each of the following: the pencil or pen you are using, the paper you are writing on, the chair you are sitting on, the desk you are sitting at and the room you are sitting in.

For the whole class - Draw a large face on a poster. Pin another poster next to it and challenge the class to write 100 words that could be used to describe it. This can be a work in progress - words get added as students think of them.

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