A is for Adjectives! Building Skills

 One of my favourite activities when I tutor is to teach ADJECTIVES.  It is such an easy way to spice up a sentence and enliven an otherwise mundane story. Here are some ideas to build up your literacy skills in the area of adjectives.

ABC ADJECTIVES: (Writing) One of the best activities for this is to write out the alphabet with one letter per line. Then, together, try to think of an adjective for each letter.  A-awesome, amazing, artificial   B-beautiful, botanical, boring, Once you have gone through the alphabet once, go through and add a second adjective, then a third.  It is a fantastic vocabulary builder and becomes a great reference when writing stories.

NOTEBOOK ADJECTIVES:  (Writing)Another good option is to take a notebook and have at least a page for each letter of the alphabet and as you find descriptive words, write them in alphabetically.  This strengthens your ABC skills at the same time.  The advantage to a notebook is that you can include the definition for the word if it is unfamiliar.

SYNONYMS: (Writing, Speaking) A challenge is to find another word for the simple one that first comes to mind.  "He ran fast." He?  The young boy  Ran? sprinted or raced Fast? quickly, rapidly, speedily.  So now the sentence can say, "The young boy sprinted speedily."  You increased the sentence length, clarified your picture, added detail and increased the grade level of the writing.

ANTONYMS:  (All) A game of opposites also helps to build up your knowledge of adjectives. Be the first to declare the opposite word Fast: slow, Happy; sad, interesting: boring and so forth.  You could also have written down antonym pairs that need to be matched together.

MAD LIBS:  (Reading, Writing) These usually involve more than just adjectives.  A simplified form would be filling in the blank of a sentence with a missing adjective.  A mad lib is a whole story with blanks throughout and the type of word to be filled in listed below (noun, verb, adjective).  The idea is to, without knowing the story yet, randomly suggest a list of words and when they are later included in the prepared story, the outcome is often hilarious with a sample sentence being...."The rich lion was tapdancing in his cage when a ...."

ON THE SPOT: (Speaking)  Describe a cloud, the bench, the beach, the neighbour's dog, your backpack....

WHAT AM I? (Listening, Vocabulary) Instead of describing an item in your sight, make a game of adjectives by using them as clues to a word you are thinking of and see who can guess what it is.  For example, I am long.  I am scaly. I have a rattling tail.  What am I?  A rattlesnake.

REACH INSIDE: (Sensory: Listening, Speaking)  Have a bag with a number of items inside.  It could be anything.  You could choose a theme if you prefer such as things on a farm or things in your bedroom.  You could also do this activity to reinforce a phonetic lesson such as things that start with the letter B or the SH sound.  Let's do SH.  Into the bad you will put a toy sheep, a shell, a shoelace, a shirt for a doll, a toy ship and a shaker toy. The child can reach in, without peaking, and FEEL an object and describe it to others who try to guess what it might be. Then they pull it out to see if they were right and someone else gets a turn.

ADJECTIVE WORD SEARCH: (Reading) If you are reading a book, you can search for adjectives and see how many can be found.  "The furry, blue monster laughed at the silly cat with his toy mouse."  I found four adjectives.  Did you?  You can do this verbally too and try to catch all the adjectives that come out during speech.

EVERYDAY LANGUAGE:  (Listening, Speaking) Of course, another simple method is to just use descriptive words in your common speech.  "Oh! You have pretty, black hair and a sparkling hairbow today!"  "Let's put the fuzzy, blue sock on your left foot first!"  It is always meaningful to set the example first.

The world is a beautiful place!  What activities do you do to build up the usage of adjectives in your daily communication?