Locate the articles in a given sentence, "a", "an" and "the." These are adjectives, called limiting adjectives, telling which one.
Find each noun, which is a person, place, thing or idea. Look for the words that tell what kind, how many and which one. For example, "The red striped towel draped loosely over the white fence." The nouns are towel and fence. The words red and striped tell more about the towel, they are adjectives. The fence is described as white, making this word an adjective. Following the first step you immediately noted the article, "the," which appears twice in this sentence, and labeled it an adjective. Each adjective has been identified in this sentence distinguishing them from any adverbs.
Look for the word ending in "-ly." Often an adverb ends in "-ly" so it is easy to spot. You can now identify the remaining descriptive word in the last example, "loosely." You have effectively noted the difference between an adverb and an adjective.
Recognize the verbs within a sentence, the words that show action or state of being. Search out the words that describe how, when, where or to what extent; these are the adverbs. Note this case, "April ran faster than Sarah." Explaining to what degree, faster is identified as an adverb.
Replace the verb in a sentence with a form of a "to be" verb to search out any predicate adjectives, which come after the verb, much like adverbs, but describe the subject of a sentence. Try it in this illustration, "Sally felt pretty in her blue dress." Replacing "felt" with "is" indicates that pretty is an adjective describing Sally, the subject of the sentence.