Printables, Activities, and Books to Teach Adjectives

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Use a few of these picture books to teach adjectives to your elementary students. Pair them with a few hands-on activities to bring the lessons to life.

So far on the blog, we’ve talked about using picture books to teach idioms, nouns, and verbs. Continuing with my “teaching grammar with picture books” portion of this series, let’s talk about adjectives.

Adjectives are describing words. They always describe or modify nouns. In order to be good writers, students need to be able to use adjectives to dress up their sentences.

“Dogs bark” is a pretty boring sentence. “The little brown spotted dog barked” paints a much better picture.

One fun way to teach about adjectives is to put a familiar object in a brown paper bag and ask your child to describe it. How does it feel? What shape is it? All of those words will be adjectives.

Books to Teach Adjectives

As I have in my previous “teaching with picture books” posts, I’ll revert back to my favorite grammar picture books by Ruth Heller and Brian P. Cleary.

Remember that Cleary’s books seem to be written for a younger audience. Hairy, Scary, Ordinary is a great book to use when introducing adjectives to your kiddos.

Another great introductory book is Quirky, Jerky, Extra Perky. Once they’ve got the hang of things, you can introduce your kids to comparative and superlative adjectives with Breezier, Cheesier, Newest, and Bluest.

Ruth Heller’s Many Luscious Lollipops is good for students who many already have some knowledge of adjectives already, because it’s more comprehensive than the other books mentioned. It covers all types of adjectives in one book – demonstratives, articles, possessives, and more.

I’ve not read them, but I found A is for Angry: An Animal and Adjective Alphabet and If You Were an Adjective on Amazon. They both look good.

A is for Angry is written by Sandra Boynton, and I’ve never read a book of hers that I didn’t like.

Once your kids are comfortable with adjectives and you’ve read a few of these fun books with them, print these adjective worksheets to reinforce the content and give them practice with adjectives.

Preparing the Worksheets

Print and laminate the anchor chart. I like to print this page on cardstock before laminating to make it more durable. This is a great page to show kids to illustrate adjectives. The rest of the pages can be printed on regular printer paper and passed out to your kids.

Using the Worksheets

As I mentioned above, you can use the anchor chart to illustrate adjectives. After teaching this to kids, you can hang it on the wall for students to reference in the future.

The adjective challenge is a great page for older students to use as they come up with specific adjectives – 3 that start with H, describe a pet, describe your best friend, etc.

Next, kids will draw a picture on the page. Then, they’ll use as many adjectives as possible to describe that object.

Then, there is a list of 15 nouns. Students will use an adjective to describe each one.

Finally, there is a page of 24 words. Students should read each word and color the ones that are adjectives.