Word Classes

A word class worksheet

Tap a word class, then tap the words on the board and they take its colour. Nouns one shade, verbs another, and a paragraph of ordinary writing turns into a map of how English is put together - which is far easier to see than to be told.

Modelling, not testing. You colour it live, thinking aloud, and the class watches the decision being made.

The awkward words are the lesson. Every real passage has words that could be two classes. That is the good bit.

Prints the passage and the key. All eight classes, and your passage big and widely spaced, ready to highlight.

Colour the passage live on the whiteboard · printing the key is free to try

The sheet it prints

The printable word classes sheet - a colour key for all eight word classes, then the passage printed large to colour in.

What are word classes?

Word classes are the jobs words do in a sentence - noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, determiner. They are what most of the world calls parts of speech; English schools have used "word class" since the current curriculum, and the two mean the same thing.

They appear in the statutory English appendix from the infant years onwards, where children are expected to name nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs, and they carry on being tested right through to the end of primary.

Why teach word classes on a real passage?

Because the words that make word classes worth learning only appear in real writing. A worksheet sentence is built so every word has one obvious answer. A paragraph from an actual book contains running, which is a verb here and a noun three lines later, and that is the moment a child stops labelling and starts thinking.

The other reason is that word classes are only useful if they eventually explain something about the writing. Colouring a passage shows a class, visually, that a tense action scene is mostly verbs and a description is mostly adjectives - and that observation is worth more than any amount of correct labelling.

How do you run it?

Colour four or five words yourself first, out loud, including one you have to think about - children need to see the hesitation. Do nouns and verbs before adjectives, stop and take a vote at every disputed word, then let them highlight a passage of their own.

Colour four or five words yourself first, out loud, including one you have to think about. Children need to see the hesitation.
Do the easy classes first - nouns, then verbs. Adjectives and adverbs after, when the sentence is half coloured and the gaps help.
Stop at every disputed word and take a vote before you resolve it. This is the actual teaching.
Print the sheet: the key and your passage, ready to highlight.
Finish with the pattern question: which colour is there most of, and why this paragraph?

From the classroom

The mistake I made for years was picking clean passages, so the lesson always ran smoothly and taught almost nothing. Now I deliberately choose a paragraph with two or three genuinely ambiguous words in it and I do not resolve them quickly. "Is light a noun or an adjective here?" produced twenty minutes of the best grammar talk I have had, and the class arrived at the answer that it depends on the sentence - which is the whole point and cannot be taught by telling.

Which word classes should you start with?

Nouns and verbs first, then adjectives - two colours at a time, never four. Add adverbs and conjunctions once they are comfortable, and determiners, prepositions and the deliberately ambiguous words to stretch them.

Where the class is	Colour these
First time out	Nouns and verbs only, then adjectives. Two colours at a time, never four.
Once they are comfortable	Add adverbs and conjunctions. Start asking why a writer chose a particular verb.
To stretch them	All of them, including determiners and prepositions, and the ambiguous words left in on purpose. Use the colour pattern to talk about the writer’s choices.

How is a word class different from a word's meaning?

A word class describes the job a word is doing in this sentence, not what it means. This is the single most useful thing to say to a child who is stuck. Water means the same wet stuff in "the water is cold" and "water the plants", but it is a noun in one and a verb in the other. Children who look for the meaning get stuck; children who ask "what is this word doing here?" nearly always get it right.

Try it now

Take three sentences from whatever the class is reading - not a made-up SPaG sentence - and colour them live. Real writing produces the arguments that a worksheet sentence never will.