What Is an Adverb? for Kids | Learn about the role of an adverb

What is an adverb? For kids, adverbs are kind of like advertisements. The goal of an ad is to promote or hype up a certain product or service and tell you how great it is. Adverbs are similar. They hype up or give more detail to verbs. Here's an example. Let's pretend you want to sell lemonade. It is the best lemonade ever because you squeeze the lemons yourself and make it from scratch. You set up a stand on the side of the road and create an amazing banner to hang up that tells people exactly what you're selling. Lemonade. But there are only a few people who are stopping at your stand. Maybe they are not sure that you made the lemonade yourself, so you change your sign. Squeezed lemonade. After a while, you realize that your change did not really help and squeezed lemons does not tell your customers when the lemons were squeezed. People might think they are old lemons, which would be kind of gross. So you decide to hype up your sign. By adding an adverb, you change it to freshly squeezed lemonade because that is exactly what it is. And guess what? You've got more customers. From this example, we see that adverbs are words that describe verbs, but they do something else important, too. They also tell how an action is completed or answer the questions of when, where, how, or how much, how often. Let's take a look at the different categories of adverbs and a few examples of each one, starting with when. This category includes words like after, now, and later. As you smarties can see, when refers to a period of time and can be as specific as 2 p.m. or as vague as later. Let's see if you can pick out the adverb in the following sentence. First, let's look for the verb or action word. Okay, if read is the verb, which word describes when it will happen? What do you think? If you said tomorrow, you are right. Now, let's talk about where. Some words include here, there, over, downstairs, and below. Where shows the location of an action. Let's find the where adverb in this sentence. The dog is hiding under the table. First, we find our verb, hiding. And where is the dog hiding? Under the table. Under is the adverb. This poor hiding dog must have been over getting petted. Let's move on to how. This group of adverbs shows how an action happens. Happily, slowly, softly, kindly, and playfully are just a few examples. Let's find the adverb in another sentence. They yelled loudly on the roller coaster. If yelled is the verb, what is the adverb? How did they yell? Did you say loudly? That is right. Nice work. Here is an interesting fact. These how type of adverbs all end in ly. But not all adverbs do, as we have seen with the when and where categories. Still, looking for a word that ends in ly is a good way to check if a word is an adverb. How much or how often is the last category of adverbs? This includes words like sometimes, hardly ever, often, seldom, and nearly always. Let's look at one final sentence and find the adverb. They always brush their teeth. Brush is the verb. Which word tells us how often they brush? If you said always, you are exactly right. Nice job, adverb adventurers. Adverbs are super important and give verbs a little extra kick. The next time you are writing or telling a story, think about the ways that you can add adverbs into your sentences to make your verbs really shine. And as always, have fun. Hope you had fun learning with us. Visit us at learnbright.org for thousands of free resources and turnkey solutions for teachers and homeschoolers.