Topic: Primary

Objective

To understand diffferent types of collective nouns.

Usually, nouns can be singular or plural, like book or books.

What other examples can you think of? 

There are some nouns which only appear in the singular. Can you think of any? 

Objective

To explore the meaning of gender in nouns.

Activity 1

What's the difference between the words mother and father?

Nouns for people can refer to a man or a male such as father or to a woman or female such as mother .

In language, we call this difference gender.

For each noun, write the word that expresses the opposite gender: 

Objective

To explore the meaning of simple, everyday nouns, and how they relate to your experience of the world.

Activity 1

Look at this list of nouns: chair, fork, dog, house, person, football player

What do they all have in common?

Objective

To explore the meaning of simple, everyday words and how they relate to your experience of the world.

Activity 1

There are many kinds of words.

Do you know the words for what you see in the picture? Talk to a partner and write down as many words as you can.

This short 3 minute film, produced by UCL Life Learning, introduces the English Grammar for Teachers course for school teachers.

For more information about the course and to book a place, go to the English Grammar for Teachers page on the UCL Life Learning website.

Activity 3: How many words?

Look at the sentence below and answer the following questions:

1. How many different words, in the sense of dictionary words, are there?
2. Which items can be grouped together as forms of the same word?

• I think teasing tigers is unwise, because I teased a tiger once and barely escaped alive.

Activity 2: Same word or different words?

Would you say the following are different words or the same word?

• hesitate, hesitates, hesitated, hesitating

It depends what we mean by ‘word’! In one everyday sense, they are all different words.

Activity 1: Finding word parts

From the list below, pick out the words that are complex. Can you break them down into meaningful parts?

1. bread
2. sunshine
3. fossil
4. sleepwalker
5. unhappy
6. umbrella
7. rebuild
8. laughing

There are some further questions on the next slide.

Now look at the parts of the words that you have found. Which ones can be used on their own?