Opposites: Write the Opposite Word

This 1st grade opposites worksheet prints a dashed word bank of eight words across the top — wet, strong, short, heavy, big, night, quiet, cold — and eight numbered cards below it, two across and four down. Each card carries one word in large type beside a double-headed arrow: day, dry, light, loud, hot, weak, small, tall. Under the word sits a three-line handwriting rule. The child reads the card, hunts through the bank for the word that means the opposite, and writes it on the rule. Every bank word is used exactly once, so a card the child cannot solve at first can be reached by elimination at the end.

The child works with the word that means the opposite, not with a picture of something big or small, and that is what makes this a vocabulary page rather than a comparison page. Pairs such as day and night or hot and cold are already in a first grader's speech; pairs such as heavy and light or strong and weak ask for a little more thought, and light appears here as the opposite of heavy, not of dark, which is a distinction worth saying aloud. The teacher listens for the child reading the card word before searching the bank; a child who starts from the bank and guesses is matching shapes, not meanings.

It prints on a single sheet with room for a name and date. The opposites-with-pictures page is the Kindergarten step before this one, and the opposites-in-a-sentence page carries the same pairs into full sentences.