It is widely known that a noun is a person place or thing. It doesn’t stop there though. Teaching children the difference between proper and common nouns does not have to be difficult or boring! These Common and Proper Noun Sorting activity is a great parts of speech activity for first grade, 2nd grade, and 3rd grade students.

It is super important to me to make sure that my daughter is having fun while she learns. I quickly realized that she gets an attitude when she is bored and that helps no one. She doesn’t learn, I get frustrated and nothing good comes of that.

Creating exciting, engaging and simple activities is critical. I also like when activities are lower prep. It helps me and gets the activities out for my daughter quicker – which is always a good thing.

Common and Proper Noun Sorting

My daughter loves sorting activities. It helps to see the big picture and then break it down into the smaller categories! This can be a helpful tool for many different skills, but this is especially so. I think that because common and proper nouns are so similar that it is good to see the two side by side!

Alphabetical Order

The first sorting activity that we have is to put the nouns in ABC order and then determine if they are common or proper nouns. This is helpful to practice alphabetical order as well as deciding which noun they are categorized as.

We started this activity by cutting out all of the word strips. Once they were ready, we put them in alphabetical order.

The next step is up to you. You can either have the child write the words in alphabetical order or glue them on in alphabetical order. Both have benefits, so it is totally up to you. After each one is written or placed, I had my daughter say the word and then determine if it was common or proper. She decided to use smiley faces in the boxes, but check mark or an x would work just as great!

Noun Worksheet

The next activity is straight sorting. We started similarly by cutting out the word strips. These are different words from the first activity, so if you opted to write the words you could use those word strips on this part of the activity too.

Again, I had my daughter state what the word was and place it in the correct box.

Noun Exercises – Write Your Own

This is a simple extra. I wanted my daughter to really understand and I knew that I would know if she had grasp the concept if she could figure out her own nouns and classify them correctly.

One other great thing about all of these activities is, not only do they work well together, but they can be prepared to use over and over. If you are a teacher and want to use this for many students, or a mom who wants to be able to use this more than one time, you are in luck.

You can laminate the sheets and use them with dry erase markers. You could also put velcro dots on the sorting mats and on the back of the word strips and they can velcro them in the right spots.

Download Common and Proper Noun Sorting