The following are some classroom activities for teaching countable and uncountable nouns to Beginners. It presupposes the teacher has taught the basic rules of what countable and uncountable nouns are and goes on to further practice of those nouns as well as activities on how to use much, many, a lot of and how much or how many. I have found that food vocabulary is a lot of fun for kids and they find it very interesting to pretend they are at the supermarket!

Activities

• Hand out this dialogue of a child and his mother at the supermarket. Ask students to read it in pairs. Ask them to pay attention to the bold words and discuss why much, many or a lot of were used each time. Ask what containers we use to talk about the quantity of uncountable nouns.

• Ask students to act out the dialogue with other kinds of food and make the necessary changes in quantifiers. They can write down the new dialogue and then stand in front of the class in pairs and act it out.

• Use these cards to cut out pieces of paper with vocabulary of different kinds of food. Put them in a bag. Hand out this picture of an empty fridge. Each student gets a piece of paper from the bag and asks the teacher questions using how much or how many to find out what food they must draw in the fridge. They use questions like “How much… is there / how many… are there in the fridge?”. In the end, they compare their drawings to see if they have got it right.

• For a fun way to revise food vocabulary, you can also use this Quizlet study set.

Enjoy!