Powerful Systematic and Explicit Instruction on Nouns for the Elementary Teacher

What is a Noun?

A noun is a person, place, or thing. Nouns can also be ideas, such as happiness, freedom, or peace, but most students at this point in their writing journeys are not ready for nouns as ideas.

It may be helpful to think of a noun as something students can touch or draw. For example, a mouse is a noun. I can hold it in my hand, and I can draw it. However, jumping is not a noun because I can’t touch jumping. You could draw a picture of a kid jumping, but the kid would be the noun, not the jumping.

You can help your students understand nouns by having them find things around the classroom that are nouns.

Here is a video you can share with your students to teach them about nouns. You will only want to show the first part of the video that ends with the kids finding nouns. The second part of the video introduces common and proper nouns which we will cover in a later lesson.

Noun Pictures

You can also show your students pictures to help them understand nouns. Show your students these five pictures and have them name the nouns they see. They can write their answers, tell a partner, or brainstorm as a class. Ideally, you will have students think independently, share with a partner, and then collect three to five nouns from the class to record on an anchor chart.

Next, you will want to brainstorm a list of nouns that students can use in their future writing. In the next lesson, students will start writing sentences using nouns and action verbs, so you will want to focus on people and animals as you brainstorm with your students. This will give them lots of options for their sentences tomorrow.

Printable Resources

These ideas will get you started teaching your nouns lesson, but we have printable resources that will make a huge difference. Luckily, my team at For the Love has you covered! You can get all of these resources to make planning and teaching a breeze!

Word List: A list of words for the lesson for when your mind goes blank while brainstorming.

Word Chart: A tool for students to organize words they will use to write sentences. Students record words from brainstorming on their word charts, so when they write sentences, they can focus their attention on the mechanics and syntax of the sentence instead of coming up with new ideas. Word charts are the perfect place to integrate social studies and science lessons into writing.

Our later lessons have additional tools to support the students as they write sentences.

You can get the lesson on nouns at Teachers Pay Teachers.

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