VA ClassesNouns, Verbs and Adjectives
Most children can recite that a noun is a naming word and still not find one in a sentence. Definitions are not the problem. Knowing what to do with a word you are unsure about is the problem, and there is a test for each of the three.
What the three do
A noun names something. A verb says what is happening. An adjective tells you which one or what kind.
Those three sentences are the whole of it, and they are also not enough on their own. A child who can repeat them will still stall on a word like running, because the definitions describe what the words mean and the question in front of them is about what a particular word is doing in this sentence. That is a different question, and it has its own answer further down this page.
Notice that berries is a noun even though you cannot point at one right now, and that three is not an adjective in the way red is. English is full of these edges. The useful move is not to memorise more categories. It is to have a test you can run on any word, which is what the rest of this page is.
What makes a sentence
Here is the part that surprises children. Of the three, only two are compulsory.
The rule worth keeping
Every sentence needs a noun and a verb. If you cannot find both, you are looking at a phrase, not a sentence.
What adjectives add
Adjectives get taught as decoration, which is why children sprinkle them about and teachers write too many adjectives in the margin. They are not decoration. An adjective narrows things down.
Say the dog barked and a reader has no idea which dog. Say the tiny dog barked and they do. That is the test of whether an adjective is earning its place: does the reader now know something they did not know? Three adjectives in a row usually means none of them was doing much.
Three tests that work
These are the tests to use when a word will not sit still. They are quicker than the definitions and they are right far more often.
The fox, the freedom, the Tuesday. All fine, so all nouns. The quickly, the ate. Not fine, so not nouns. This one catches the tricky nouns that name ideas rather than objects.
If you can move the word from today to yesterday, it is a verb. Ran becomes runs becomes will run. Fox does not become foxed in any way that keeps the meaning. This is the only test that reliably catches is, was and seems.
Very hungry, very red, very old. All work, so all adjectives. Very fox and very ate do not. Careful with this one, because very quickly also works and quickly is not an adjective, so pair it with the question: what kind of thing is it describing?
Common mistakes
1. Thinking a verb has to be an action
This is the big one, and it is the fault of the phrase doing word, which children are taught early and never told to drop. In the fox is hungry the verb is is. Nothing is being done and it is still a verb, because it is the word that changes when you move the sentence to yesterday. Miss this and roughly a third of all sentences appear to have no verb at all.
2. Calling every describing word an adjective
An adjective describes a noun. In the fox ate quickly, the word quickly describes how the eating happened, so it is describing the verb rather than the fox. That makes it an adverb. The quick check is to ask what the word is describing before deciding what to call it.
3. Believing a word has one job for life
It does not, and this is the thing that unlocks the whole topic. In I run every morning, run is a verb. In we went for a long run, run is a noun, and you can tell because the run works and you can put long in front of it. Words take their job from the sentence they are standing in, so the honest answer to what part of speech is this word is always another question: in which sentence?
Colour a real page
- Open any book your child is already reading and pick one paragraph.
- Give them three pencils and the three colours from this page.
- Underline the nouns, then the verbs, then the adjectives, in that order.
Doing it in that order matters. Nouns are easiest, and once they are marked the verbs are usually the words left over in the middle. Two arguments will come up, and both are worth having: whether is counts, and what to do with a word that could be either.
Practice questions
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What to learn next
Once the three tests are automatic, the next useful step is adverbs, because they are the words this page kept setting aside. After that, the difference between a phrase and a clause, which is what turns short correct sentences into longer ones that still work.
For parents
When your child asks what part of speech a word is, resist answering it. Ask them to try putting the in front, then to move the sentence to yesterday. They will get there themselves in about ten seconds, and the second time they will not ask.
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