How and When to Teach Nouns
Pennington Publishing GRAMMAR PROGRAMS
“A noun is a person, place, or thing.” Well… partially right, but there is much more. And knowing the definition of this basic part of speech only gets us so far. We do need to know what we are talking about when we refer to nouns. Some common language of instruction only makes sense. Even the die-hard writing process folk, who relegated direct grammar instruction to the pedagogical garbage heap in the 1980s, always agreed that teaching the definitions of the parts of speech is an essential. Ask English-language arts teachers what they wish their students knew about grammar coming into their classes in the fall. Parts of speech will be their first, and perhaps only, answer.
But why do teachers have to re-teach nouns every year? Is it the previous teacher’s fault? Is it the cyclical nature of instruction? Is it something in the water? Following is an instructional approach guaranteed to interrupt this forgetting cycle. At the end of this article, I will share an instructional scope and sequence for noun components with clear definitions and examples.
1. DIE AR 
(Admittedly a depressing mnemonic. Perhaps a subconscious wish re: the Accelerated Reader® program?)
DEFINE Help students memorize the definitions of the key noun components. Rote memory is fundamental to higher order thinking. Use memory tricks, repetition, and even songs. Check out the Parts of Speech Rap. Test and re-test to ensure mastery.
IDENTIFY Help students identify noun components in practice examples and real text. Using quality, un-canned and authentic mentor text, such as famous literary quotations and short passages/poetry kills two birds with one stone: identification practice and sentence modeling.
EDIT Help students practice error analysis for each noun component by editing text that contains correct and incorrect usage. Finding out what is wrong does help clarify what is right. But don’t limit your instruction, as in Daily Oral Language, to this step. Students need the mentor texts and writing practice to master their noun components. Grammar taught in the context of reading and writing translates into long-term memory and application.
APPLY Help students the noun components correctly in targeted practice sentences. Sentence frames are one solid instructional method to practice application. For example, for common nouns…
It takes a lot of (idea) ________________ for a (person) ________________ to drive a (thing) ________________ to their (place) ________________.
Possible response: It takes a lot of SELF-CONTROL for a TEENAGER to drive a SPORTS CAR to their (place) to their HIGH SCHOOL.
REVISE Help students understand the importance and relevance of learning the noun components by revising their own authentic writing. Stress using what they have learned about noun components to improve coherence, sentence variety, author voice, word choice, clarity, and style. Make sure to share brilliant revisions that reflect these improvements as your own mentor texts. Post them on your walls and refer to them often to reinforce definition, identification, and writing style.
2. Assessment
Diagnostic assessments of key grammatical features, such as noun components, serves two purposes: First, the results inform what to teach and how much time to allocate to direct instruction. It may be that one class tends to have mastery re: proper nouns, common nouns, and noun phrases but weaknesses in abstract nouns, concrete nouns, and noun clauses. A different class may have a different set of strengths and weaknesses. Why so? One of the mysteries of life. Second, diagnostic assessments provide an individual baseline upon which to build learning. Sharing this data with students is vital. Students need to know what they know and what they don’t know to motivate their learning and see the personal relevance of the instructional task. Check out my favorite whole class diagnostic grammar assessment under Free ELA/Reading Assessments.
Formative assessments need to be designed to measure true mastery of the grammatical concept. So, a useful formative assessment of noun components must be comprehensive, including all steps of the DIE AR process. The purpose of formative assessment is to identify relative strengths and weaknesses of both instruction and learning. Simply giving a unit test as a summative assessment only satisfies the teacher (and colleagues) that the teacher has covered the subject, i.e. teaching the noun components. Far better to use the data to affect instruction. Good teachers re-teach judiciously and differentiate instruction according to test data.
3. Differentiated Instruction
Differentiated instruction should focus on relative weaknesses. A good recording matrix for formative assessments will clearly inform the teacher as to who lacks mastery over which noun components and how many students need remediation. Individual, paired, and small group instruction with targeted independent practice makes sense. A workshop design in which the teacher distributes worksheets, monitors practice, and uses mini-conferences to assess mastery ensures effective remediation. Differentiated instruction doesn’t have to be a planning or management nightmare.
Noun Components Instructional Scope and Sequence 
Primary Elementary School
- Common Nouns, such as teenager, high school, sports car, freedom
- Proper Nouns, such as Mary, Pinewood Elementary School, Microsoft Word®
- Compound Nouns, such as baseball, playground, cartwheel
- Single Nouns, such as desk, Ms. Brady, group
- Plural Nouns (with spelling rules), such as books, churches, lives
Intermediate/Upper Elementary School
- Abstract Nouns (nouns that cannot be sensed), such as freedom, patience, thoughts
- Concrete Nouns (nouns that can be sensed), such as ice cream, velvet, movie
- Nouns as Simple Subjects, such as George left town.
- Nouns as Compound Subjects, such as George and Sam left town.
- Nouns in Compound Sentences, such as George left town, and Sam left, too.
- Complete Nouns/Noun Phrases, such as Crazy George and his best friend left town.
- Nouns as Objects of Prepositional Phrases, such as George and Sam left town for the vacation of a lifetime.
- Collective Nouns (nouns that refer to groups with members), such as That herd of sheep was in the pasture.
- Nouns to Avoid (things, stuff, etc.), such as The thing is… I already have that stuff.
- Nouns as Abbreviations, such as I love the U.S.A.
- Nouns as Acronyms, such as We had a guest speaker from N.A.S.A.
- Hyphenated Nouns, such as English-language arts is my favorite subject.
- Irregular Plural Nouns, such as deer-deer, child-children, foot-feet
Middle School
- Noun Clauses, such as Whenever I studied, I passed my tests.
- Greek and Latin Noun Plural Formations, such as cactus-cacti, crisis-crises, appendix-appendices
- Nouns as Direct Objects, such as I left my wallet.
- Nouns as Indirect Objects, such as I gave John my wallet.
- Nouns as Gerunds, such as Smoking is hazardous to one’s health.
- Nouns as Appositives, such as That nice couple, Juan and Tasha, brought us cookies.
- Mass (non-count) Nouns (These nouns don’t form plurals and are usually abstract), such as mud, insurance, music
High School
- Nouns as Nominative Absolutes (a separate phrase or clause that modifies the main noun and verb), such as “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed (Second Amendment to the United States Constitution).”
- Nouns as Predicate Nominatives (a noun or pronoun following a noun and a linking verb that defines or re-names the noun), such as Joe is a murder suspect.
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Pennington Publishing Grammar Programs
Teaching Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics (Grades 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and High School) are full-year, traditional, grade-level grammar, usage, and mechanics programs with plenty of remedial practice to help students catch up while they keep up with grade-level standards. Twice-per-week, 30-minute, no prep lessons in print or interactive Google slides with a fun secret agent theme. Simple sentence diagrams, mentor texts, video lessons, sentence dictations. Plenty of practice in the writing context. Includes biweekly tests and a final exam.
Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics Interactive Notebook (Grades 4‒8) is a full-year, no prep interactive notebook without all the mess. Twice-per-week, 30-minute, no prep grammar, usage, and mechanics lessons, formatted in Cornell Notes with cartoon response, writing application, 3D graphic organizers (easy cut and paste foldables), and great resource links. No need to create a teacher INB for student make-up work—it’s done for you! Plus, get remedial worksheets, biweekly tests, and a final exam.
Syntax in Reading and Writing is a function-based, sentence-level syntax program, designed to build reading comprehension and increase writing sophistication. The 18 parts of speech, phrases, and clauses lessons are each leveled from basic (elementary) to advanced (middle and high school) and feature 5 lesson components (10–15 minutes each): 1. Learn It! 2. Identify It! 3. Explain It! (analysis of challenging sentences) 4. Revise It! (kernel sentences, sentence expansion, syntactic manipulation) 5. Create It! (Short writing application with the syntactic focus in different genre).
Get the Diagnostic Grammar, Usage, and Mechanics Assessments, Matrix, and Final Exam FREE Resource:
Get the Grammar and Mechanics Grades 4-8 Instructional Scope and Sequence FREE Resource:
I found this highly beneficial for my lesson plan.