1st Grade Adjective Lesson Plan: Hairy Scary Activities

Hairy, Scary, Ordinary

Begin the lesson by reading the book “Hairy, Scary, Ordinary: What is an Adjective?” to students, and ask them to raise their hands when they hear you reach the definition of an adjective. Continue reading, pointing out the pictures to students and emphasizing the many words used to describe each object. When you finish, ask students to summarize the main point of the book in pairs. Then have pairs share their summaries with the class.

Describe Me

Have each student draw a picture of an object that they like. Tell students that the picture may be of a pet, a type of food, a place, or a hobby-related object. Then encourage students to write adjectives that describe the object around the picture. Display their artwork on the wall, and have some students share their pictures and adjectives with the class. Encourage students to listen to their classmates’ ideas about additional adjectives they could add to their drawings.

Adding Adjectives

Ask students why adjectives are important. Make sure they understand that adjectives can help to describe the objects in a piece of writing so that you can visualize them or understand them in greater detail. Write several simple sentences on sentence strips, such as “The cat lay on the ground” and “The boy picked up the box.” Put the strips on the board and ask volunteers to tell you where to cut the strips to insert an adjective, and which adjective could be inserted.

Adjective Search

Have students look through a story they’ve read recently and make a list of the adjectives they find. Have them choose two of the adjectives and explain why those adjectives are important to the story. Tell them to think about how that sentence in the story would be different without those adjectives. Then encourage them to write several sentences as an explanation, and encourage them to share their thoughts and ideas with the class.

Looking for more ideas? Try playing some adjective games.