Word sorts are an effective way of introducing plural rules, as they allow students to discover the plural rule patterns themselves. You can either do as a guided literacy group activity, or as a whole class investigationl

We start by just sorting words where you add ‘s’ or ‘es’. Once the kids have sorted all the words, we work out what the rules are, and the kids practise some examples on their whiteboards. I progressively follow the same process for the other plural rules.

I put up a plural rules display only after we’ve done these investigations- I find the kids use it so much more because they’ve had ownership over discovering the rules!