Learning to Write – Teaching Grammar - Adjectives

When teaching grammar to students, keep lessons simple, teach one concept at a time, and then practice using it so students will find it easier to remember. We have discussed the teaching of verbs and nouns in previous blogs.  Today we will discuss adjectives. This is the third blog in this series on teaching basic grammar.

It may not seem important to teach grammar but when an English teacher tells a student that his writing would be better if he added more adjectives, he needs to know what an adjective is. Learning to write well is very important to success in school.

Adjectives describe or tell you things about a noun.  How many, what size, what color, etc. Write a simple sentence:  “Tom drives a car.” Identify the nouns.  (Tom, car)  Identify the verb.  (drives)  (Note: The word “a” is an article. There are only three words that are articles—“a”, “an’, and “the”.)   Now describe the car. What does it look like?  The car is little and it is red. Little and red are the adjectives—the words that tell about the noun (car).

1.  Define. “An adjective tells about a noun.” Ask students to repeat the definition.

2.  Give examples of words that are adjectives.

3.  Ask students to identify the adjectives (the descriptive words) in a sentence.

4.  Write simple sentences together; then add adjectives to describe the noun to make a more descriptive sentence.

5. Ask students to write a few simple sentences of their own.

6.  Add adjectives to the simple sentences to turn them into descriptive sentences.

7. Turn the descriptive statement into a question. Use a question mark at the end. Remind students to capitalize the first word in each sentence and capitalize all proper nouns.

Students will find this simple grammar lesson which includes the use of capital letters and punctuation easy to remember.