Take a well-known story -- a fairy tale is ideal -- and create blanks for the nouns, verbs and adjectives in the story. If you are doing this with one child, work with him in filling in the blanks to re-tell the tale. If in a classroom, number the blanks and call on students to fill in the blanks as you read the story. It’s a fun way to take the pressure off but to get the lesson across.
Collect pictures of desserts from old magazines or checkout a few cookbooks from the library. Just by looking at the pictures, have your child get as detailed as she can to describe how the dessert appears to her. It’s a sweet way to help her better understand adjectives.
Further reinforce how adjectives describe nouns by having your child or students find pictures of people either completing some type of activity or expressing an emotion. Have them state in two words, a noun and adjective, what is depicted in the picture. For example, if the picture shows a baby lying in a crib asleep, the student might say “sleepy baby.”
Have your child or student use a copy of one of her favorite stories to identify parts of speech in a paragraph. Have her create a chart and record each part of speech into the appropriate column. It will help that she is familiar with the piece and she may be pleased to learn something new about the story by reading it a different way.