How to Teach Common and Proper Nouns: Resources, Games, & Scavenger Hunt

Looking for common and proper nouns activities?

I used to feel like common and proper nouns were one of the most gray areas to learn for my students.

Country isn’t capitalized, but the names of them are. General directions aren’t capitalized, but street names are. Some days it felt like I was teaching some kind of riddle!

It wasn’t until I started focusing on more long term exposure and using a variety of teaching methods that I could finally see their understanding of common and proper nouns start to break through into their writing.

Isn’t that every teacher’s dream? Never having to correct another capitalization error again? 😉

I don’t believe in perfection, but I do believe in progress!

These common and proper noun resources, games, and scavenger hunt ideas will help your students feel like common and proper nouns are a little less gray, and a little more black and white. 🙂

What are common and proper nouns?

Just to refresh for a bit, common nouns are general people, places, and things and can be applied to a wide variety such as schools, states, men, women, or parks.

Proper nouns are specific people, places, and things and are only used to identify these specific things.

Examples of proper nouns would be Roosevelt Elementary School, Virginia, John, Sarah, or the Grand Canyon National Park.

This concept can be confusing to students because of the rules that are applied for capitalization.

The word “beagle” is used to refer to a specific type of dog, but can be applied to all beagles, so it doesn’t need to be capitalized.

I’ll be sharing with you some teaching resources and activity ideas to help practice these tricky details!

Common & Proper Nouns for Google Classroom

This Google Classroom resource will help you teach common and proper nouns from the very beginning.

Your students will work on identifying the definitions of these types of nouns, sort examples of each kind, and then work their way up to creating their own common and proper nouns.

There are also some short answer questions that give your students the opportunity to correct capitalization errors of common and proper nouns used in given sentences, as well as areas for them to create their own sentences.

Every activity comes with an answer key, and a couple of the activities are actually editable, making them reusable the entire year. 🙂

You can find a closer preview and descriptions of the activities with this link!

Common & Proper Nouns Interactive Notebook

These hands-on activities comes with 3 levels of differentiation to suit the needs of every learner in your classroom.

Similar to the Google Classroom resource, it covers definitions of common and proper nouns, sorting and identification practice, and sentence work!

Of course in the beginning stages of your unit working with individual words is going to be best to practice understanding early on, but as their learning progresses, this type of sentence work is super beneficial!

Your students will start to recognize common and proper nouns in their own reading and in other places besides your classroom lessons. 🙂

I love hands-on learning, but if you’re in need of more digital resources, this interactive notebook can also be converted into an interactive PDF with Easel.

You can find it here!

Common & Proper Nouns Digital Mystery Pixels

Your students are going to love, love, love these pixels!

You’ll get a total of 4 different mystery pixels – a frog, horse, fish, and fox.

On each pixel there are a mixture of common and proper nouns given.

Your students will select if each given noun is common or proper, and as they select their answers correctly, the mystery picture appears.

I find these perfect for formative and summative assessments, homework assignments, or even just for progress monitoring.

I find kids are so much more motivated to try their best when animals and fun pictures are involved! 😉

I have a preview video of how these pixels work you can check out here!

Never used a digital mystery picture before?

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Random Picker Wheel

You could be talking about a chore wheel for kids and they will find it entertaining simply because it involves a spinner. 😉

Seriously! If you need a quick whole-class game to practice common and proper nouns, head to pickerwheel.com and type in your questions!

You could make it as simple as putting in multiple common and proper options, like I did above, and have students come up with an example of whatever the spinner lands on, or you could add specific questions to the wheel to make it even more exciting!

A few examples could be:

• Name a proper noun that starts with the letter C.
• List 5 examples of common nouns.
• Is the Statue of Liberty a common or proper noun?
• My favorite movie is Zootopia. Is Zootopia a common or proper noun?
• What is the definition of a common noun?
• What is the definition of a proper noun?

You can add as many questions as you like, and pair up your students or separate the class in half to play this super simple and FREE review game!

Matching, Sorting, & Memory

Matching, sorting, and playing memory are also quick games that involve little prep and lots of practice.

There are tons of task card templates you can use, free and paid, or you can simply create a table in a Google Doc and print.

For matching and sorting activities, I like to come up with paired examples of common and proper nouns that go together.

For example, state is a common noun, Virginia would be its match as a proper noun.

Here are few other simple matches to start with:

Again, another super simple practice opportunity, but one that can be used all year long for long-term exposure. 🙂

Scavenger Hunts

Another fun way to work with common and proper nouns and get your students to recognize them outside of the classroom is to create a scavenger hunt throughout your school.

Create questions that lead your class as a whole to different areas of the building.

You could label each clue at the top as a common or proper so they know which to be thinking of.

Here’s an example:

Common Noun

When your tummy is empty and you’re ready to eat, this is where you go for a tasty feast.

*This could then lead your students to your cafeteria or common area where they eat lunch!*

For a proper noun example you could send your students to the principal’s office, a school statue, or even another teacher’s classroom. Get creative!

I hope these common and proper nouns activities, resources and games bring you lots of variety and practice to your students while working on common and proper nouns!

Sometimes it’s not always about how extravagant they are, but how much fun your students are having, how critically they’re thinking, and how well they can work together. 🙂

Want more ideas on how to liven up grammar? Check out my blog post on how to make teaching grammar FUN! Click here to read!

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