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In fourth grade, Common Core Language Standard 4.1.D says students should correctly order adjectives within sentences… before they can order them, though, they have to understand how to classify different adjectives. I created these cards with various adjectives-
I put three of each kind into four Ziploc bags and split my kids into four groups. I quickly made a sorting mat for them on 12×18 paper, folded into eighths, then had them work as a group to figure out where the words fit on their mat.
Some of the words are a bit tricky because they aren’t words they hear on a daily basis. Also, opinion and condition words can get hard to determine! I told them to remember a condition can be proven, while an opinion is only what someone thinks and someone else might not think the same… the students rotated to all four sets of adjective cards to practice sorting them.
We are doing this activity with my Mentor Sentence Freebie for The Stranger by Chris Van Allsburg. The sentence has three different types of adjectives, so we talk about the classification of them. The accordion interactive notebook activity can be found in my Volume 2 Language Arts Notebook Companion for THIRD Mentor Sentence Unit. My students had to write one adjective from each group on their accordion once I told the group that their words were all in the correct places. (By the end of all four rotations, they had four words in each category.)
They did a great job talking about why they thought the words went in each category, and at the end of the day, several of them said it was their favorite thing they did today! (I always ask them on their way out the door to tell me their favorite thing we did that day.)
Tomorrow, I will have them use their words from their accordion to describe a few nouns of their choice- and I want them to try to list at least four types of adjectives (in order of course)! I hope these activities are things you can use, too. Enjoy!
