Teachers often ask students to use more adjectives in their writing.
But what are they?
Before we look at adjectives,
it is important that you understand what a noun is,
because adjectives and nouns
go together.
Nouns: person – baby place - London thing - cake
A noun can be:
·
A person – Mum, John, girl,
teacher, President, friend.
·
A place – France, shop, beach,
home, London, Eiffel Tower.
·
A thing – dog, tree, house, bed,
hat, toy, cloud, road, lolly.
If the noun starts with a
capital letter it’s called a proper noun.
Adjectives are words that describe the noun.
The adjective can describe a noun in lots of different ways.
Look at this poster to see how you can describe a noun:
When we write a sentence, there is always a noun in the sentence. The noun
is the subject that we are writing about.
·
The dog barked.
·
Tom read his book.
·
The ship sailed
away.
In these sentences the words in blue
are the nouns (nouns: dog,book,ship / proper noun: Tom).
By using adjectives in our
writing, we can make our sentences more interesting to read.
·
The lonely dog barked.
·
Old Tom read his tattered book.
·
The huge ship sailed
away.
Sometimes a sentence has more than one noun:
I found a sock in my toy-box.
We can use adjectives to
describe both nouns:
I found a smelly sock in my old toy-box.
We can even use more than one adjective, but we must remember
to separate them with a comma:
I found a smelly, bobbly sock in
my old, blue toy box.
The Adjective Game.
You can play this game with your friends or family when you
are sitting around the table having tea, or when you are going on a car
journey.
Take it in turns to think about a noun.
Now see if each person playing the game can think about an adjective to describe the noun.
For example: house
·
haunted house
·
pretty house
·
huge house
·
derelict house
Notice how the different adjectives make
you imagine a different kind of house each time.
Hopefully, you now know what an adjective
is.
So, the next time your teacher asks you to use more adjectives in your writing, you will know what to do!
Remember, adjectives make your
work more interesting to read.
There are lots of links on the internet that will help you to
use adjectives in your writing.
Why not play some of these games, and make your teachers very
happy when they see adjectives in your work!
Ice Cream Talk – select nouns
Word Invasion – untick all options other than nouns and
adjectives
Noun Explorer - Identify the nouns
Adjective Explorer - Identify the adjectives
Trapped – use your mouse arrow to push the crates
(Note, comparative adjectives tend to end in er. They compare two nouns:
bigger, smaller, longer, taller, quicker, slower etc.)
This post has been written by Karen Crichton, one of our English tutors at Blackhen Education. For more information about any of our English courses, feel free to contact me at: sue@blackheneducation.com or visit our website: www.blackheneducation.com
