Schoolhouse Rock: Unpack Your Adjectives
Now that you’ve learned about nouns and verbs, it’s time to learn how to make these parts of speech more exciting. First, we’ll modify nouns with adjectives in this article. Then, we’ll modify verbs with adverbs in the next article.
In the Schoolhouse Rock animation short film called “Unpack Your Adjectives,” a little girl and her turtle friend come home from a camping trip. But, as soon as they do, their friends want to hear about everything they saw. To make their story more interesting, they use the parts of speech called adjectives.
If want to be able to tell more interesting stories about your weekends and vacations to your friends and coworkers, you will need to learn a lot of adjectives. Memorize this cute little song, and you will remember some very useful ones.
Watch and sing along with the lyrics provided below:
Got home from camping last spring.
Saw people, places and things.
We barely had arrived,
Friends asked us to describe
The people, places, and every last thing.
So we unpacked our adjectives.
I unpacked “frustrating” first.
Reached in and found the word “worst.”
Then I picked “soggy” and,
Next I picked “foggy” and,
Then I was ready to tell them my tale.
‘Cause I’d unpacked my adjectives.
Adjectives are words you use to really describe things,
Handy words to carry around.
Days are sunny or they’re rainy.
Boys are dumb or else they’re brainy.
Adjectives can show you which way.
Adjectives are often used to help us compare things,
To say how thin, how fat, how short, how tall.
Girls who are tall can get taller,
Boys who are small can get smaller,
Till one is the tallest,
And the other’s the smallest of all.
We hiked along without care.
Then we ran into a bear.
He was a hairy bear,
He was a scary bear,
We beat a hasty retreat from his lair.
And described him with adjectives.
[Turtle:] Woah! Boy! That was one big, ugly bear!
[Girl:] You can even make adjectives out of the other parts of speech, like verbs or nouns. All you have to do is tack on an ending like “-ic” or “-ish” or “-ary.” For example, this boy can grow up to be a huge man but still have a boyish face. “Boy” is a noun, but the ending “-ish” makes it an adjective, “boyish.” That describes the huge man’s face; get it?
Next time you go on a trip,
Remember this little tip:
The minute you get back,
They’ll ask you this and that.
You can describe people, places, and things.
Simply unpack your adjectives.
You can do it with adjectives.
Tell them ’bout it with adjectives.
You can shout it with adjectives.
CONCLUSION
Almost any word that describes a noun is an adjective. Can you spot the adjectives in the following lyrics from different popular songs? The adjectives are in italics:
“On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair,
Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air,
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light.
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim;
I had to stop for the night.”
“It was an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini that she wore for the first time today.”
“It was a one-eyed, one-horned, flying, purple people-eater.”
“Blue-jean baby, L.A. lady, seamstress for the band,
Pretty-eyed, pirate smile, you’ll marry a music man.
Ballerina, you must have seen her dancing in the sand.
And now she’s in me, always with me, tiny dancer in my hand.”
“Now the whole damned bus is cheering and I can’t believe I see a hundred yellow ribbons round the old oak tree!”
If you want to buy the entire collection of all 46 Schoolhouse Rock videos in a special edition 2-disc DVD 30th anniversary set from Amazon.com, click here
[For more Schoolhouse Rock videos, click here.]
[For more “Easy Steps to Success with English,” click here.]
