Here are some instant lesson ideas that you can use to teach your primary/elementary students adjectives. They will compliment your printed worksheets or grammar workbooks. You can use them as introductory or extension activities. The best thing about them is that they don't require any preparation.

1. WHAT IS AN ADJECTIVE?

This is a simple way to introduce or revisit the concept of adjectives. Ask your students to write down the definition of adjective without any help from you. Ask those students that want to, to read their definition out loud to the class. Discuss these with the class and then write the best one on the board for the whole class to make a copy of. You could also do this as a small group challenge. The group with the best definition could place it on the class notice board. Each student could then write 1 or 2 adjectives to be placed under this. To control the size of the words you can fold a piece of A4 paper into 4 strips and ask each student to write their adjective on one of the strips, in bold colorful letters.

2. THINKING OF ADJECTIVES.

This is a simple way to start your students thinking of different adjectives. Ask them to write the word ADJECTIVE vertically on a page and then write an adjective that starts with each letter of the word (eg, angry, dowdy, jagged, excited and so on). I know you may be thinking that this is an overused activity but it is a great way to spark creativity and the students always enjoy it. When that is done you can easily introduce other challenges for individual or groups of students.

Here are some possibilities:

a) Write the alphabet down vertically on a page and then write down an adjective that starts with each letter of the word.
b) Who can write down, in five minutes, the most adjectives you can use to describe a person. On your marks gets set go! The topics for this are endless - weather, feelings, water, animals, clothes.
c) Draw 5 columns on a page and write each of the senses as a heading (touch, sight, smell, hearing, and taste). Now, write as many adjectives that relate to each sense as you can.

3. PARAGRAPH AUTOPSY

Choose any paragraph from any book your students have been using and write out the adjectives in it. Discuss what type of adjectives they are. Can they be grouped? What senses do they explore? Are there other adjectives that mean the same thing? Do all the students know what they mean? Read the paragraph without the adjectives and discuss whether the meaning has changed.

4. ADJECTIVE OPPOSITES

Write a list of adjectives on the board. Ask the students to write down these adjectives and then write an opposite adjective for each one (happy/unhappy, angry/peaceful). If you want to take this further your students could then write two adjectives that mean the same thing (eg. angry, furious, mad, livid or happy, joyful, serene, giddy).