gunmajet.net

Time Length:
~10 min

Lesson Point:
Practice Writing Plural Forms

The Plan:
After giving the students some intstruction on what plurals are, explain that there are some general rules that help when writing plural forms of nouns. Give all the students one of the attached sheets and go through the rules with them. After explaining the rules, taking care to make sure that they know that a vowel+y at the end of the word does not follow rule 3, let them try to make the singular and plural forms of the words on the sheet. Walk around and help the kids while they do this.
The basic rules:

ほとんどの名詞にsをつけるだけ。
- Hotondo no meishi ni 's' wo tsukeru dake.
- For most nouns you just add 's.'
名詞の語尾(ごび)はs, ch, sh, x, zなら、esをつける。
- Meishi no gobi ha 's', 'ch', 'x', 'z' nara, 'es' wo tsukeru.
- If the tail end of the noun is 's', 'ch', 'sh', 'x', or 'z', add 'es.'
語尾(ごび)は子音(しいん) + yなら、yをとって、iesをつける。
- Gobi ha shiin purasu 'y' nara, 'y' wo totte, 'ies' wo tsukeru.
- If the tail end of the word is a consonant plus 'y', take off the 'y' and add 'ies.'
There are of course more rules than this, but trying to memorize more than this at once will really give the students a headache. Plus the words that they encounter that follow other rules are rare. More likely they will see things like child -> children which don't follow any pattern. They'll just have to memorize those ones.
Teachers often ask about 'o' being included in rule 2. I didn't put it in because many of the words ending in 'o' that the kids know do NOT take 'es' to make them plural. (video, piano, radio)
*You will need this font to properly print out the worksheets.