Get ready to rock your students with these 5 awesome adjective games for the classroom! Teaching adjectives can be boring with adjective worksheets OR you can engage your students with these easy, low-prep adjective games. It is so important to realize that adjective worksheets are not the best way to teach our students. These adjective activities are mostly NO PREP and you can throw them into your day when you need to spice up teaching adjectives.
Before you dive into these games, you have to check out my Adjective Café. It’s such a FUN way to wrap up your adjective lessons.
Adjective Games
#1: Mystery Noun
-Choose a noun in the classroom and give the students an adjective to describe. Call on a student to guess the noun based on the adjective. If they are incorrect, give another adjective clue. Continue giving clues until a student guesses the mystery noun.
-To add a twist to the adjective game, have a student come up and act as the teacher. They get to choose a mystery noun and give adjective clues to the class. Do you have an extra 5 minutes? This is also a quick adjective activity you can have the students play in partner groups.
#2: Adjective Word Hunt
-After teaching adjectives, partner up students or have them work independently. Give them an on-level text and paper for recording. This could be leveled readers, Scholastic magazines, reading textbooks, etc. Set a timer and have the students go on a word hunt for adjectives in their books. They should record the adjectives as they find them. When the timer goes off, have the students share the adjectives they found with the class. This was a great adjective game for 2nd grade students when I taught grade 2!
#3: Rolling For Adjectives Game
-Let’s make identifying adjectives into a fun adjective game! Designate a spot on your classroom board for a Rolling for Adjectives scoreboard. Split it into Teacher vs. Student. Each day, write a sentence on the board with 1 or more adjectives. Choose a student to identify the adjectives. After correctly identifying the adjectives, that student gets to roll dice to earn points for the class scoreboard. THEN the teacher also gets to roll dice to earn points. If a 1-5 is rolled, that team earns that number of points (roll a 3, earn 3 points). If a 6 is rolled, that team loses ALL their points. Play the Rolling for Adjective game all week to see who has more points on Friday . . . the teacher or students!
#4: Tic-Tac-Toe Adjective Game
-Draw a tic-tac-toe grid on the board and split the class into two teams (X’s and O’s). List 3 words for the students, making sure only one is an adjective. Call on a student from team X to identify the adjective. After correctly identifying the word, that student may place an X on the grid. List 3 more words and choose a player from team O to identify the adjective. Continue playing this fun adjective game until one team gets a tic-tac-toe!
-Try this twist on the same adjective classroom game! Draw a tic-tac-toe grid and write words inside the boxes . . . some adjectives and some not adjectives. Call on a student from a team to read the word and identify if it is an adjective or not. After answering correctly, that student can place an X or O over the word.
#5: Adjective Sketch-It
-The last of our adjective practice games is so easy and encourages student creativity! Set a timer and give the students a category (food, animal, people, places). Then have them each draw a picture based on the category. When the timer goes off, have the students write adjectives to describe their picture. Partner them up but have the students keep their picture secret! The partners will then take turns giving adjective clues to each other and try to guess their partner’s picture. This was one of my students’ favorite adjective games for first grade!
Let me know how you and your students like these adjective games! If you need something fun to wrap up your unit, check out this blogpost to see how I hosted an Adjective Cafe in my classroom.
