When to Use ‘A,’ ‘An,’ or ‘The’
Hello everyone! Ever wonder about how to teach the articles a, an and the? You are not alone.
Here we go – articles in a snap!
Below I have laid out some of the rules about using ‘a, an, and the’. Quick and easy!
Articles in general
We use a/an when we don’t need to say which thing we are talking about. We use ‘the’ to talk about a specific thing.
Remember, in order to use ‘a’, ‘an’, and ‘the’ properly, you must know whether or not a noun is a Count or Non-Count Noun.
- A count noun is the name of something that can be counted:
one book, two books, three books.
- A non-count noun is the name of something that cannot be counted:
juice, stew, freedom, happiness.
Indefinite articles:
Use ‘a’ before words that start with a consonant sound and ‘an’ before words that start with a vowel sound.
When to use ‘a’ and ‘an’
- with singular countable nouns: to refer to a person or a thing that you are mentioning for the first time
- before singular nouns that are unspecified
- before number collectives and some numbers a gallon, a million
Definite articles:
When to use ‘the’
- to identify a specific person or object
- to indicate a noun that is definite or has been previously specified
- with names of geographical areas, rivers, mountain ranges
- before superlatives and ordinal numbers
- with decades
There are several exceptions, or more complicated situations for using ‘a’, ‘an’, and ‘the’ properly, the above information serves only as a beginning guideline but, can serve us well.
Happy Teaching,
Need an easy and engaging activity for your students to practice articles?
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from Fun To Teach – Grammar, Language, Math, ESL/ELD, Spanish, Reading, Writing, Centers and more! https://esleld.blogspot.com/2022/04/how to teach Articles – a an the.html
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