Language Arts Grade Five

Unit Five, Lesson Two: Making Plurals

  1. chicken
  2. check
  3. rich
  4. peach
  5. chase
  6. cheek
  7. shore
  8. depth
  9. ferry
  10. crystal
  1. clear
  2. Mercury
  3. Venus
  4. Earth
  5. Mars
  6. Saturn
  7. Jupiter
  8. Neptune
  9. Uranus
  10. Pluto
Making Plurals

Some times when you pluralize a noun you have to do something different than just add an "s". Inspect this list of words that end with a "y". 


      SINGULAR NOUN		PLURAL NOUN

        story			  stories
	toy			  toys
	play			  plays
	bunny			  bunnies
	key			  keys
	jelly			  jellies
	try			  tries
As you can see, in order to pluralize a noun that ends in "y" sometimes you just add "s" and sometime you drop the "y" and add "ies". If you look at the letter before the "y" you will notice that the words to which you just add an "s" have vowels and that the words in which you drop the "y" and add "ies" have consonants. So, you just add add "s" for "boy" because the letter before the "y" is an "o" which is a vowel. To pluralize city you drop the "y" and add "ies" because the letter before the "y" is a "t" which is a consonant. 

  Remember that the vowels are a, e, i, o, and u.
There are some other rules about pluralizing, but we will deal with those in the next unit. For now we are just going to deal with adding "s" and dropping the "y" and adding "ies". Here are a few more examples. 

	SINGULAR		PLURAL

	city			cities
	boy			boys
	fly			flies
	battery			batteries
        opportunity		opportunities
	bay			bays
	ferry			ferries

There are also words that end in ss, sh, ch, and x which have their own special rule: 


	ADD -ES
Here are some words which end with ss, sh, x, or ch in their singular and plural forms: 

	SINGULAR NOUNS		PLURAL NOUNS

	  fox			  foxes
	  church		  churches
	  leech			  leeches
	  leash			  leashes
	  wish			  wishes
	  speech		  speeches
	  box			  boxes
	  kiss			  kisses

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