Nouns for kids: common, proper and other types of nouns

What is a noun?

A noun is a naming word. It names a person, place, animal, thing or idea. Teacher, Chicago, giraffe, pencil and happiness are all nouns. Nearly every sentence has at least one, because a sentence has to be about someone or something.

A quick test is to put "the" or "a" in front of the word. If it makes sense, the word is probably a noun: the teacher, a pencil, the happiness she felt. Names don't pass this test (you wouldn't say "the Chicago"), so pair it with a second question: does this word name something?

Types of nouns

• Common nouns name any one of a kind: city, girl, river, day. They start with a small letter unless they begin a sentence.
• Proper nouns name one particular person, place or thing: Maria, Chicago, the Nile, Tuesday. They always start with a capital letter.
• Concrete nouns name things you can see, hear, touch, smell or taste: bread, thunder, sand.
• Abstract nouns name feelings, ideas and qualities you cannot touch: courage, friendship, fear, honesty.
• Collective nouns name a group as one unit: a team of players, a flock of sheep, a herd of cows.
• Compound nouns are made from two words: football, toothbrush, bus stop.

One noun can belong to several types at once. "Courage" is common and abstract. "Team" is common, concrete and collective. Children don't need to pick a single label; they need to know what each label means.

Common and proper nouns

The difference is general versus particular. "Dog" could be any dog, but "Pepper" is one dog. "School" could be any school, but "Lincoln Elementary" is one school. The capital letter is the signal that a noun is proper.

Proper nouns include the names of people and pets, cities, countries, rivers and mountains, days of the week, months, holidays and book titles. Seasons are not proper nouns, so spring, summer, fall and winter take small letters. Family words like mom and grandpa get a capital only when they are used as a name: "Can Mom drive us?" but "My mom is a nurse."

Singular and plural nouns

Most nouns add -s to mean more than one: cat, cats. Nouns ending in s, x, ch or sh add -es: bus, buses; box, boxes; lunch, lunches. Nouns ending in a consonant and y change the y to i and add -es: city, cities. A few nouns change in the middle or don't change at all: child, children; mouse, mice; tooth, teeth; sheep, sheep. These irregular plurals simply have to be learned.

Nouns examples at different levels

• Grade 1: "The frog sat on a log." The nouns are frog and log.
• Grade 2: "Our class saw a flock of geese over the lake." The nouns are class, flock, geese and lake. Class and flock are collective nouns, and geese is an irregular plural.
• Grade 3: "Ella showed great kindness to the new boy in March." The nouns are Ella, kindness, boy and March. Kindness is abstract; Ella and March are proper.
• Grade 4: "The noise from the crowd filled the stadium." The nouns are noise, crowd and stadium. Noise is a noun here, even though the related word noisy is an adjective.

How nouns are taught in school

In the US, Common Core starts in kindergarten with frequently occurring nouns and verbs and regular plurals (L.K.1b, L.K.1c). Grade 1 covers common, proper and possessive nouns (L.1.1b) and capitalizing dates and names of people (L.1.2a). Grade 2 adds collective nouns and irregular plurals such as feet, children and mice (L.2.1a, L.2.1b). Grade 3 adds abstract nouns like childhood and asks children to explain what nouns do in a sentence (L.3.1a, L.3.1c).

In England, Year 1 pupils use capital letters for the names of people, places and days of the week and add -s or -es to make plurals. The word "noun" joins the grammar terms in Year 2, along with noun phrases. Nouns are among the word classes tested in the KS2 English grammar, punctuation and spelling test at the end of Year 6. One difference to know: British English often treats a collective noun as plural ("the team are winning"), while American English usually treats it as singular ("the team is winning").

Nouns practice at home

• Play I Spy with nouns. Everything you can spy is a noun, which makes the idea concrete straight away.
• Open any book and hunt for proper nouns by their capital letters, skipping the first word of each sentence.
• Write words on sticky notes and sort them into person, place, thing and idea piles. The idea pile is where abstract nouns go.
• Try the practice set below. It asks your child to find the noun in a sentence, spot the proper noun, choose a collective noun, turn a word into an abstract noun and write irregular plurals. Then print a fresh nouns worksheet with an answer key for another day.