Nouns and Adjectives: Naming Words Against Describing Words

Owl, big, small, antelope, reindeer, tall, hot, donkey, pig, red. Ten chips, five animals and five describing words, laid out in two rows across the top of this 1st grade word-classes page with nothing printed on them but the word itself. Two bins wait below, one carrying a framed-picture icon with Nouns underneath and one carrying overlapping colour blobs with Adjectives, both ruled with six dashed lines. The child reads each chip, decides whether it names something or tells you what something is like, and writes it inside the bin it belongs to.

Setting nouns against adjectives isolates the contrast that children find least obvious. A noun and a verb are easy to keep apart because one is a thing and the other is an action; a noun and an adjective both attach to the same object, and a child looking at the word tall has to notice that it never stands on its own. Concrete adjectives do that work best, which is why the describing words here are sizes, a temperature and a colour rather than words about feeling or character. The chip to watch is red, because a colour is often heard as a thing rather than as a quality of a thing.

Print the PDF free and ask for a two-word phrase before each chip is copied down: a tall reindeer, a red owl. The phrase makes the adjective lean on a noun, which is the audible version of the whole distinction. Nouns and verbs is the other two-bin page in this family, using actions instead of descriptions, and word classes: sort nine words moves up to all three bins with a picture on every noun chip.