Our Spotlight lesson this week is The Face, a fun and colourful vocabulary lesson from our Word Bank – Describing People & Things section. As a follow-up and expansion, try teaching some common adjectives that your students can use to describe the face and hair. You can also use these adjectives with Tara’s vocabulary activity (which will be on our blog on Thursday). Scroll down to the end of this post for examples, sentence patterns, and a discussion on comma placement with multiple adjectives.
Eyes
- blue
- brown
- hazel
- beautiful
- pretty
- big
Nose
- big
- small
- pointy
- crooked
Eyebrows
- thin
- thick
- bushy
- brown
- blond
- red
- black
Eyelashes
- long
- short
- black
- brown
- blond
- red
Lips
- full
- thin
- red
- pink
- chapped
Teeth
- white
- yellow
- straight
- crooked
Face
- heart-shaped
- square
- round
Hair
- long
- short
- curly
- straight
- brown
- black
- blond
- red
Sentence Patterns
There are two common adjective patterns in English:
Be + Adjective
Adjective + Noun
Examples
- Her hair is long and blond.
- He has curly, black hair.
- You have beautiful, blue eyes.
- My eyelashes are long and black.
- I have a heart-shaped face.
Multiple Adjectives
In English, we use a comma to separate two or more adjectives that come before a noun. After the Be verb, we must use and. (The comma before and is optional with a series of adjectives.) The order of descriptive adjectives in English is opinion-size-shape-color.
- He has big, blue eyes.
- His eyes are big and blue.
- She has beautiful, long, red hair.
- Her hair is beautiful, long(,) and red.
For more information about the order of multiple adjectives, check out Adjective Order and Punctuation on our sister site.
Practice
Pair your students up and get them to take turns describing each other’s faces and hair. If there is time, have each student describe one aspect of their partner’s face or hair to the whole class.
