Adjective and examples are probably the part of speech that my students find easiest. I don’t know what it is about adjective and examples but students just take to this topic well. We all use adjectives throughout our daily lives, when we are discussing an outfit we have bought, when we are talking about a nice meal we had or even just talking about what the weather is like! Let’s get started on the next step of our parts of speech journey, adjectives!
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What are adjective and examples?
Adjectives are describing words. They are words we use to describe a noun, which is a person, place or thing. We use adjectives in everyday life without even thinking about it. Most of the time, adjectives will come before the noun in a sentence so they are easy to identify. But it doesn’t always have to be this way. Let’s take a look at an adjective example so you can see the different ways we can use adjectives.
Adjectives directly before nouns
Adjectives appearing directly before a noun are the easy ones to spot. If your child is asked to find an adjective in a sentence and it appears straight before the noun, it is easier for them to spot it. Adjectives and noun examples in sentences would be, ‘The happy dog ran around the field.’ As you can see, the adjective ‘happy’ appears straight before the noun ‘dog.’
Adjectives not directly before nouns
Adjectives can be used to describe a noun, even when they don’t appear directly in front of the noun. A tip for helping your child identify adjectives in these types of sentences is to look for the main subject of the sentence. What is the sentence talking about? For example, ‘It smells horrible in the changing room.’ The sentence is telling us about the smell in the changing room. The changing room is the subject of the sentence and the adjective describing the smell is ‘horrible.’
Why do we need to use adjectives?
Imagine a world where you didn’t describe anything. You don’t describe how a sunset looks, how that cupcake tastes, what your new house looks like or your Christmas dinner? That would be a pretty boring world, right? We use adjectives to describe how something looks, feels, tastes, smells and sounds. Using positive or negative adjectives tells us whether someone likes a certain person, place or thing. We can also use adjectives to describe how much we have of something. For example, ‘I have three, beautiful children.’
Using adjectives adds detail to sentences, stories and speech. They help us to be able to envisage a certain scene in our minds, depending on how vivid and well it is described to us. Let’s compare two sentences, one using adjectives and one without.
Sentence 1: I went to the beach today. There was sand and waves.
Sentence 2: I went to the beautiful, sandy beach today. There was golden, soft sand and large, sparkling waves.
Which sentence makes you see that beach in your mind and make you want to visit it more?
Adjectives and Adverbs
At times my students can get a bit confused between adjectives and adverbs. It can be extra confusing when the adjective isn’t directly in front of the noun. The major difference between adjectives and adverbs is that adjectives describe nouns and adverbs describe verbs. Let’s take a look at the difference between adjective and adverb examples. ‘The cake tastes poor!’ I find it useful to ask my students, ‘What is the word ‘poor’ describing?’ We can see that it is describing the cake. Therefore, poor is the adjective and cake is the noun.
Let’s look at a similar sentence about cake. ‘The cake tastes poorly.’ This time the word ‘poorly’ is being used as an adverb as it is describing how the cake tastes which is the verb. The major difference is the spelling, the letters ‘ly’ are at the end. This is a tell-tale sign that a word could be an adverb.
Nouns being used as adjectives
To make things even more complicated for us all to understand, nouns can also be used as adjectives. Wait what? How does that even make sense? Look at the words wood, guide and door. On their own, they are just normal nouns. We can transform them into adjectives by adding another noun after them. For example, ‘wood floor,’ ‘guide dog’ or ‘car door.’
Be careful with compound nouns…
There is a sneaky way that students can get tricked by when trying to identify adjectives and that is when compound nouns get involved. When my students are asked to find adjectives in particular sentences a compound noun can easily throw them off track.
Let’s take this sentence as an example, ‘I went to the swimming pool after school.’ Some of my students will highlight ‘swimming’ as the adjective as it describes the type of pool. Makes sense doesn’t it? Well, unfortunately, that would be incorrect! The word ‘swimming pool’ is a compound noun. Some other examples of compound nouns that can be mistaken as adjectives are ‘wedding cake,’ ‘bus stop,’ and ‘living room.’
If you would like a refresher course on nouns, check out my blog post, Nouns Different Types: 6 Essential Types of Nouns Your Brilliant Child Should Learn.
What will my child’s adjective homework look like?
Chances are that adjectives will make an appearance in your child’s homework at some point. There are a few ways tasks that your child may be asked to complete using adjective and examples. Some of the tasks could include:
- Identifying adjectives
- Write descriptive sentences or passages using adjectives
- Finding adjectives in comprehension
I will show you some ways that adjectives appear in my students’ homework. But remember, every school and teacher is different so adjectives could pop up in different ways or tasks.
Identify Adjectives
This is probably one of the most popular ways that adjectives could appear in your child’s homework. Identifying adjectives in sentences by highlighting, underlining or colouring the adjectives.
Here is an example:
Underline the adjectives in the following sentences.
Melissa and Stephen decided to get a puppy. They chose a beautiful, brown, fluffy puppy who had white spots on his paws. They named him Max and bought a bright, red collar for him to wear.
In these sentences, the adjectives used to describe the puppy are ‘beautiful,’ ‘brown,’ ‘fluffy’ and ‘white.’ The next thing described in these sentences is the collar. It is described as ‘bright’ and ‘red.’
Write sentences
Another way that your child may be asked to interact with adjectives during homework time is by writing descriptive sentences. They may be asked to write sentences to describe their house, their holidays or their weekend. Adjectives and examples sentences are, ‘Write a few sentences to describe your garden.’
My garden is big and very green. There are lots of pretty, bright flowers and comfortable chairs that we can lie on during the summer. I love being in the garden, especially when it is a lovely, warm day.
The adjectives used to describe the garden are, ‘big,’ ‘green,’ ‘pretty,’ ‘bright,’ ‘comfortable,’ ‘lovely’ and ‘warm.’
Comprehensions
Popular questions that will come up as your child progresses through primary school and if they are completing transfer test preparation are finding adjectives in comprehension. Students will be required to find adjectives in a piece of text or extract from a story. They may also be given a particular word from the text and have to identify whether it is a noun, verb, adjective or adverb.
Let’s take a look at an adjective example.
‘The sparkly ice was twinkling on the branches of the tree.’ Which word in the following sentence is an adjective?
The adjective in this sentence is, ‘sparkly.’ There are a few ways your child may be asked to record their answers. These could be selecting their answer from choices, circling the word that’s an adjective or writing the word which is an adjective.
How to teach your child adjective and examples
Now that we have covered what adjectives are and how they might make an appearance in your child’s homework it’s time to talk about ways in which you can help teach your child adjectives at home.
Adjective and Examples in Nature
If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know I love having an outdoor option on my learning tips! There are so many positives to learning outdoors, that I would need to dedicate a full blog post solely to that topic. Being outdoors is the perfect place to explore adjectives. There are so many different sights, sounds and smells. Take a walk in the park and ask your child to describe what they see, hear, smell and feel. When you are walking, ask your child to find 10 adjectives to describe their surroundings. You can also download some ‘Adjective Hunt’ sheets online to make your walk more exciting than normal.
Adjective and Examples in Everyday Life
If you aren’t able to take a trip to the park, you can simply talk about your day! Describe your day in detail. Talk about your day with your child and make sure you use lots of descriptive words. Then it’s your child’s turn, encourage them to use adjectives everywhere that they can. Relating adjectives to their everyday life will help adjectives become more memorable for your child.
Adjective and Examples – Games
Games are perfect for helping your child learn about adjectives in a fun way. There are plenty of online and printable games out there to teach students about adjectives. I always recommend playing these games alongside your child because this will be a lovely experience and activity to complete together. Rather than just making an appearance when worksheets are involved. There is a great Adjective vs Adverbs game available on Amazon that you can play together as a family. I have attached my affiliate link above which means I get some extra pennies from Amazon if you purchase through my link.
You can also make your games for free at home. Use cards or Post-It notes to create your own adjective memory games, snap cards, adjective bingo or charades games. Grab some cards, and felt tip pens and get cracking!
Adjective and Examples – Worksheets
Worksheets are a great way to solidify learning after completing all of those fun activities from above. Once your child has a solid understanding of what adjectives are, grab some fun worksheets to further develop their learning of adjectives. I have attached some great adjective worksheets below for you to get started!
- Colour the Nouns, Verbs and Adjectives
- Adjective Worksheet Pack
- Themed Adjective Worksheets
- Adjective Word Searches
More Information on Adjectives
9 Tips for teaching kids Adjectives in a fun way
Teaching Adjectives to Children: Activities and Worksheets for Helping Kids Learn Adjectives
Welcome to the world of adjectives! You will be using adjectives left, right and centre after reading this blog post! I hope that I have helped you tackle those adjectives homework. Don’t forget to check out my blog posts on nouns and verbs to keep you up to speech with all things parts of speech.
That free SEAG-style practice paper that I talked about at the start of this blog post, you can get it right here! Keep this blog post handy in case you ever need a refresher on adjective and examples. Let’s create happy, confident learners together!
