Adjectives Lesson Plans

One way for students to increase their English ability is to start using adjectives, but adjectives lesson plans are not always easy to make interesting.

Click Here for Step-by-Step Rules, Stories and Exercises to Practice All English Tenses

Depending on the length of your lessons, you may not want to spend the whole lesson teaching adjectives, but you can still make it the main objective and focus of the lesson.

Here are a few ideas you can use if you want to teach your students adjectives.

Beginners

The main need of students who are starting to learn English is vocabulary.

You should therefore use a variety of vocabulary teaching techniques and activities.

1. A lesson focusing on adjectives could start with a review of vocabulary.
   
   Depending on the subjects you've been teaching, it could be classroom vocabulary, household vocabulary, or people.
   
   Adjectives to describe physical appearance of objects and people are very useful at this stage.
   
   
2. Once the students have reviewed some noun vocabulary, you could then give them some adjective pictures and words to match in pairs.
   
   They could then pair the words in opposites.
   
    
3. Following this, they could ask each other questions about the reviewed vocabulary and answer them. 
   
   
4. And finally they could write some sentences using the adjectives.

At this level it is important to stress the word order in English, i.e. that the adjective comes before the noun, not after it.

Elementary

At this level, students need to increase fluency and vocabulary.

Adjectives to describe character, emotions, and feelings become more useful, and a review of descriptive adjectives is also important.

• One activity that works very well at this level is basing your lesson around a fictional crime.
  
  For example you could tell a story about an expensive necklace that has been stolen. The students could then be given a picture of a person who they saw near the jewelry shop at the time, and they have to describe them.

• Comparative and superlative adjectives are also introduced at this level and there are many games and activities you can use to teach this grammar.

Pre-Intermediate

Students at pre-intermediate level need to expand their vocabulary.

At this level, collocations can be introduced, and story activities work really well for this.

• Give your students the outline of a very simple story with no description in it. 
  
  
• Then elicit from the class some suitable words to be used to make the story more interesting. 
  
  
• After this you can get the students to create a scenario and in pairs or groups, embellish the story with adjectives.

In this activity you need to feed in any useful adjectives you think the students could use, make sure they understand them, and encourage them to use them.

Also important at this level is to make sure the students know the word order for multiple adjectives.

For example:
I have a beautiful, big, red, metal table. (opinion , size , color, material )

Intermediate and Upper Intermediate

Vocabulary and fluency are key here. Encourage sharing of vocabulary during alphabet or memory games.

Develop use of correct collocations, for example, we say, "The rain was heavy," not "The rain was strong."

Keep the lessons interesting and varied

Whichever level you are teaching, it is important to make sure your lessons include a range of activities to suit all learning styles, and that they provide the students with as many opportunities as possible to speak English, either with you or with each other.

Adjectives lesson plans do not have to be boring at all!

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