Looking for Teaching Adjective Ideas?Explore these four key areas when teaching adjectives to your students. You can also find links to adjective worksheets and activities below.Improve the writing ability of your students by exploring these four key adjective areas. 1) What is an adjective? Each adjective gives the reader more information about the noun. The simple idea of a cake can be transformed with adjectives. cake Lower grade students can start looking at the idea of adjectives by exploring the ones that are found in the Dolche high frequency sight word list: big, blue, funny, little, three, two, yellow, black, brown, four, good, new, pretty, white, round, best, cold, fast, first, five, green, clean, eight, hot, kind, light, long, seven, full, six, small, ten, warm. Middle and upper grade students can begin a class exploration of adjectives by sharing all the adjectives that they can think of. This can be a simple extension of a class conversation where you write all the students examples on the board. Students could then write three or four sentences that use some of these adjectives. 2) There are many kinds of adjectives. Creating and exploring adjective groups is a great way to strengthen your students' understanding. 3) Accuracy is important. Similar adjectives can have subtle differences in meaning. Adjectives that seem the same can have slight differences in meaning. For example, smug, joyful, ecstatic and pleased all mean happy. However, each one is a different type of happy. It is these differences that gives the writer real control over the images that their words create. The smug girl ate the jelly beans. Each sentence has a different meaning created exclusively by the adjective. The writer needs to choose the adjective that accurately conveys the meaning they want. 4) Adjectives are a powerful way to introduce characters in a story. Adjectives are essential when creating characters in a narrative. Exploring the adjectives that can be used to describe characters will build up your students' repertoire. At the moment they may not be able to think of words like immaculate, dashing, ambitious, haggard or dynamic. Class discussions, brainstorming sessions, list building, and comparison activities will increase the number of personality adjectives they can access when describing characters and further improve the quality of their narratives. Want more teaching adjectives resources? Try these.Adjective Activities List of Descriptive Adjectives Adjective Order Adjective Worksheets Kinds of Adjectives Personality Adjectives What is an Adjective? teaching adjectives to home page |