Comparatives – Superlatives

Many children who have receptive and expressive language difficulties require focused interventions to introduce new syntactic forms into their language system. These attractive, colourful, fully illustrated activities in worksheet format, allow the adult to model the correct form, facilitate high levels of repetition and reinforcement, and encourage the child to use comparatives independently.

Children should be able to understand comparatives and superlatives before they are able to use them in their own sentences. So, at the age of three years, a child should be able to respond correctly when asked, ‘Where is the smallest spider?’ or, ‘Which snake is longer than this one?’ Often, the comparative form develops later than the superlative, at about the age of five years (Brown, 1973).

This pack allows parents, teachers or speech and language professionals to work with children to specifically target the construction of these grammatical forms in a creative and entertaining way and to develop games and activities using the pictures. Each comparative and superlative adjective is illustrated twice. Adjectives illustrated in the pack are: ‘big’, ‘long’, ‘high’, ‘fat’, ‘tall’, ‘thick’, ‘wet’ and ‘wide’.

Using the pictures provided, activities include:

• development of story sequences so that the child is able to hear correct uses of the forms, and can be encouraged to copy from an adult model.
• sorting games to allow close modelling of the correct form.
• picture matching and lotto games that allow for close modelling and correction.

Aims: To develop understanding and use of comparatives.

Age Range: Suitable for use with children from 5 – 8 years plus.

Contents: 39 pages, including eight common comparatives, three pages of instructions, 16 pages of colour pictures & 16 pages of black and white duplicates.

Format: A4 size in PDF format.

Reference: Brown, R. (1973) A First Language: The early stages, London: George Allen & Unwin.