Adjectives

‘Happy’ and ‘Sad’ Aren’t the Only Words!

My favourite way of teaching adjectives to Reception aged children is through the game, Guess Who. But you can also make your own guess who game using pictures from the internet.

I use a home made guess who game when talking about bugs. There are bugs with stripes, six legs, eight legs, wings, no legs, thin bodies, fat bodies, there are many ways to describe and identify different bugs.

This would also work well with aliens.

This is one for children to work in pairs, where one child describes the creature for the other child to guess. It’s a speaking and listening activity which can be developed into a writing activity, where children can write a ‘Who am I?’ card.

Getting More than ‘Happy’ or ‘Sad’

When shown a picture of a person looking worried or excited, children will often say that the person is ‘sad’ or ‘happy’ rather than using other words.

To develop children’s feeling vocabulary, from the start of the year I ask the children to show me their ‘excited’ face or some similar emotion and develop this through the year.

We could then develop that speaking and listening into a further writing piece where the children choose two characters, design their expression and write,

He is '[happy/sad/disappointed/excited/ worried/pleased/proud/annoyed/ angry/cross] because…’ which is also using a connective!

I’ll publish writing frames as I have them.