Fun Activities to Practice Nouns!

Let’s face it… nouns are not the most exciting things for your students to learn. But they definitely need to know and recognize them in their reading. So are there any ways to practice nouns in a fun, engaging way? Of course there are!

And check out this earlier post about nouns.

Let’s Practice nouns

A noun is a person, place, or thing. Once kids know what a noun actually is, here are some ideas to make practicing nouns more fun:

To help students make connections to real reading situations, just have them start finding nouns in real sentences, such as in some sentence strips that you create.
Make a large chart to show the class, with columns for People, Places, and Things. Write nouns on sticky notes and have students come up individually and place a note in the correct category.
A different option for the sorting idea above is to give each student or pair their own chart with pictures or written words and let them glue them in the correct column.
Give students a sheet of paper to write down nouns that they find in their reading. Then they can indicate whether the nouns are common or proper.
Another sorting type activity is to let them physically sort nouns based on whether they are common or proper nouns. This would work individually or as a class.
See if students can give examples of proper nouns that match a common one. For example, a common noun would be store, and a matching proper noun could be Walmart or Target.
Have students write down every noun they can find in your classroom. Assign point values to each type. For example, you could give 2 points for common nouns and 5 points for proper nouns.
Using any letter of the alphabet, have students write down as many nouns as they can think of that start with that letter. To make it more challenging, give them a short time frame like 2 minutes. Have some students share out their lists so that everyone can hear them and determine whether they are all nouns. Make it more challenging still by telling them to only give proper nouns.

noun activities and worksheets

If you’d like to save some time in practicing nouns, I have a whole noun unit in my store!

Image of noun posters and worksheets with text "Let's Practice Nouns, with instructional aids for teachers"

This nouns unit contains all the necessary materials in one pack for both student and teacher. Included are appropriate activities for student practice alongside suitable materials for the teacher to introduce the targeted concept. Reference materials and visual aids are included, as well as center activities and worksheets. This pack is an all-round teacher time saver!

The aims of this Nouns pack are two-fold:

To provide: