Printable Adjective or Adverb Worksheets
Printable adjective or adverb worksheets for 3rd through 5th grade, with an answer key on every sheet. The sets below cover 3 different skills, so you can start where your child actually is. Available as sorting activities and fill in the blank.
Targeted Practice by Skill
About Adjective or Adverb
What this skill is
Adjective or adverb discrimination involves determining whether a target modifier describes a noun/pronoun (requiring an adjective: "quick dog") or an action/verb/adjective (requiring an adverb: "ran quickly"). Solvers study target word identification, modification rules, good vs well, bad vs badly, syntactic discrimination, modifier placement, linking verb exceptions, descriptor choice rules, and part-of-speech function rules across sentence editing, peer revision, and essay writing.
When children learn it
Basic adjective vs adverb identification begins in 3rd grade. In 4th grade and 5th grade, students master tricky modifier pairs (good/well, bad/badly, real/really, slow/slowly), predicate adjectives following linking verbs, and modifier editing across writing workshops, grammar tests, and editing drills.
Common Mistakes
- Using an adjective to modify an action verb (writing 'he sang good' instead of 'he sang well').
- Using an adverb to modify a noun after a linking verb (writing 'the soup smells deliciously' instead of 'delicious').
- Confusing 'real' (adjective) and 'really' (adverb of degree, writing 'real fast' instead of 'really fast').