Nouns and Verbs: Sort Ten Words into Two Bins

Two bins, not three, on this 1st grade word-classes page, and the question narrows with them: is this word a name for something, or a thing you can do? Ten chips lie across the top of the sheet in two loose rows, all plain white with no pictures on any of them, mixing toys with actions: scooter, cards, sleep, hop, kite, run, lego, car, jump, sing. Underneath sit the two bins, one with a framed-picture icon on its lid and Nouns printed below it, the other with a running figure and Verbs, each ruled with six dashed lines to write on.

Dropping the third bin makes this a genuinely different job from the full sort, and an easier one in the right way. With adjectives out of the picture the two questions left are the concrete ones a six-year-old can actually answer: can you point at it, and can you do it. That is why a noun and verb sort belongs a year earlier than the three-way version. No chip carries a picture, so nothing can be classified by appearance and every word has to be read; a child who cannot yet decode scooter will stall on the reading rather than the grammar, which is worth separating when you look at the results.

Print the PDF free and ask for each word inside a short spoken sentence before it is written, since I can hop settles hop faster than any definition will. Ten words fits a single sitting with room to talk about the hard ones. Nouns and adjectives is the companion page, swapping the doing words for describing ones, and nouns, verbs and adjectives sort brings all three classes together on one sheet for second grade.