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Important update from TheSchoolRun

For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.

What this means for subscribers:

  • Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
  • In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
  • As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.

A few changes to be aware of:

  • The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
  • The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.

*If you need to reset your password, it will still work as usual. Please check your spam folder if the reset email doesn’t appear in your inbox.

What is a noun?

What is a noun?
Get common nouns and concrete nouns clear in your mind and understand proper nouns and pronouns - our simple guide explains everything primary-school parents need to know about nouns and how to form the plural forms correctly.

A noun is a naming word. It is a thing, a person, an animal or a place. 

 

Common and proper nouns

A proper noun is the name of a person or place, such as Susan or America. Proper nouns start with a capital letter.

A common noun describes a class of objects and does not have a capital letter, for example: car, animal or planet.

Concrete and abstract nouns

A concrete noun is a person, place or object you can physically touch, such as: Dad, London or a table. Concrete nouns include proper nouns and common nouns.

An abstract noun is a thing that cannot be touched or seen, such as education, love or success.

Singular and plural

'Dog', 'balloon' and 'table' are nouns in the singular. This means there is only one of them.

If these nouns were in the plural, it would mean there were more than one of them. An 's' would be added to the end to make the words 'dogs', 'balloons' and 'tables'.

Forming the plural of nouns follows specific rules:

  • If a noun ends in a 'y', to make the noun plural, the 'y' is removed and 'ies' is added: 'baby' becomes 'babies' and 'party' becomes 'parties'
  • If a noun ends in 'f' or 'fe', to make the noun plural the 'f' or 'fe' turns into 'ves': 'calf' becomes 'calves' and 'knife' becomes 'knives'

Collective nouns

A collective noun is a noun used to describe a group of something. For example:

  • the word 'herd' is a collective noun to describe a group of animals.
  • the word 'choir' is a collective noun to describe a group of singers.

Pronouns

A pronoun is a word used to replace a noun. Examples of pronouns are: he, she, it, they. Possessive pronouns such as his, hers, their, your are used so that we don't have to keep repeating the noun.

For example:

John put John's bag on John's peg. John walked to John's classroom.

If you use pronouns the sentence reads much better:

John put his bag on his peg. He walked to his classroom.
 

Learning about nouns in primary school

In Key Stage 1, children learn that nouns representing people and places (proper nouns) are written with capital letters. They are also expected to start replacing their nouns with pronouns and use the plural form of nouns, simply by adding 's' to a word.

Later on, they will move onto learning how to make words ending 'y', 'f' and 'fe' into plurals using the correct spelling patterns. They may also learn about collective nouns.

In Year 2 they'll be forming nouns by using suffixes, and by Year 3 forming nouns using a variety of prefixes. From Year 4 they'll identify and learn to expand noun phrases.