Getting Pupils to Pick Great Adjectives

Lots of pupils turn to the same old words every time they need to use adjectives in their writing. You know the ones: good, bad, nice, fun (to name just a few). The problem is that they’re all a little, well, boring and they’re not doing much to push your pupils’ vocabularies to the next level. Here’s our super-duper useful guide to helping your pupils choose more ambitious vocab to make their writing more interesting.

What are Adjectives?

Adjectives are sometimes called ‘describing words’, as they’re used to describe nouns. In the sentence, ‘It was a dreadful day’, ‘dreadful’ is the adjective — you can tell because it describes what the day (the noun) was like. Adjectives don’t always need to come before the nouns they describe. For example, you could say ‘The day was dreadful’, and ‘dreadful’ is still the adjective in this sentence.

Introduce your KS1 pupils to adjectives with this monstrously good PowerPoint which gets them to identify and choose suitable describing words for different nouns and sentences.
 

Building Vocabulary

Once pupils know what adjectives are, it can still be a challenge to get children to use them in their own writing. When they do, it’s often tempting for them to just recycle the few they feel comfortable with instead of branching out and trying something new. However, CGP+ has a plethora of resources to help your pupils choose great adjectives in their written work.

It can be easier for pupils to work with an existing piece of writing instead of starting with a blank page and wondering what to write. Worksheets like this one for Years 5 and 6 encourage pupils to swap out boring words for more interesting ones. They can also add descriptive words to improve paragraphs in this worksheet for Years 5-6. Activities like these can help pupils feel more confident in choosing more adventurous language.

One way of showing pupils how important adjectives are is to get them to spot them in books they’re reading. You could ask them to think of other adjectives the writer could have used instead, which can make for a great opportunity to get the thesaurus out! Ask them which adjectives they think work well, and which they think might have been better left out or changed.

Pupils could also do a research task to find some adjectives that they think are interesting, either because they have cool or strange meanings, or just because they have an unusual sound or spelling. After they’ve picked their adjectives, challenge pupils to use them in their own creative writing. Speaking of creative writing, CGP+ has a whole bunch of creative writing prompts to fire up your pupils’ imaginations — and they all come with suggested word banks too.

Younger pupils can be prompted to add adjectives to very simple sentences. These worksheets for Year 1 give some suggestions for pupils to describe their favourite animal or food. Psst — these last two resources were actually requested by a customer. We answer customer requests all the time at CGP+, so why not send one our way?
 

Fun Ways to Teach Adjectives

Grammar isn’t always the most exciting topic to cover, but with adjectives you’ve got the opportunity to have a lot of fun describing things. Why not…

• Show pupils a random picture and see who can think of the most words to describe it?  Extra points could go to the pupil who can think of the longest word.
• See who can write the sentence with the most adjectives in?  Even though writers wouldn’t usually use numerous adjectives all in one go, it’s a fun (and funny) exercise to see just how ridiculous a simple sentence can become by throwing in as many as possible.
• Get pupils to change the tone of their writing using adjectives?  You could give them a simple sentence, like ‘The house was on the hill’, and then ask them to change the mood of the sentence using only adjectives.  Can they make it funny, scary, sad or exciting by only adding adjectives to the sentence?
• Give the whole class one adjective that they’ve got to use somewhere in their work — and not necessarily in their English or Literacy lesson?  If you give them a tricky word, it can be a real challenge to find somewhere to use the chosen word.  Picking a word with multiple meanings can encourage pupils to think about the ways that words can be used differently depending on context.
• Ask pupils to use reading books, a thesaurus or the Internet to find the adjective they think is the best?  Then, they could campaign for their adjective to be voted the best out of the ones that everyone in the class has chosen, with example sentences as evidence of how fantastic their word is.
   

Getting ambitious with adjectives has never been so enjoyable! And if you just can’t get enough grammar (I know I can’t), check out our word classes blog for more about adjectives, nouns and all that jazz.

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