Plurals
Introduction to basic plurals
Your child's first encounter with plurals will come when they are introduced to the concept of there being one of something, or more than one of something.
Often, just add 's'
For example:
bird becomes birds when there are more than one.
girl becomes girls
cat becomes cats
When it ends in a soft 's' sound, add an 'e' too
There are some words to which we add 'es' instead of just 's'. These are all words which end with a soft 's', 'sh' or 'ch' sound which can be spelled x, ch, sh, zz or s.
For example:
box becomes boxes
bush becomes bushes
glass becomes glasses
bench becomes benches
As you can see, this ending can be spelled in lots of different ways, so it's a good idea to practice saying the different words out loud and listening for that soft s type sound at the end to help decide on which plural ending they take.
Other anomalies include the word potato, which, although it doesn't end with the soft 's' sound, also takes the 'es' ending.
potato - potatoes
In all of these cases, the original word stays the same so it's just a matter of tacking s or es on to the end.
Plurals with different endings
Things get slightly trickier when it comes to words that change in unpredictable ways between their singular and plural forms.
Words ending in y
If the word ends in a 'y', and the letter before the y is a consonant, like the word 'city', we need to remove the y, and replace it with an i before adding the 'es' plural ending. For example:
city - cities
Words ending in f/fe
When the singular word ends in an 'f' or 'fe', like the word 'wolf', we need to change the f to a v before adding es to make the word plural. For example:
wolf - wolves
life - lives
Beware of exceptions to this rule, like the word chef which just takes an s to make it plural. For example
chef - chefs
Other exceptions are the word cafe, which also just takes an s on the end, and the word safe when it is used as a noun. For example:
cafe - cafes
safe - safes
Really irregular plurals
Some plural versions of words are really different to their singular versions - many don't even end in an s! Here are some of the most common irregular plurals that children will come across:
child - children
person - people
woman - women
foot - feet
goose - geese
When there is no plural at all
Some words don't change at all when they are in the plural. For example one fish, two fish, many fish. The same goes for deer and sheep.
Other words that don't change are called "uncountable nouns". These are nouns like sugar or sand which stay the same no matter how much of them we are talking about!
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