Possessive Nouns – Free ESL Lesson Plan [Updated 2025]

Our new ESL Lesson Plan teaches about the use of possessive nouns. A robust lesson plan with clear descriptions, examples and practice opportunities, this is an engaging lesson that will help your students understand the use of for for things and places and the use of apostrophes for singular and plural nouns. The lesson is designed for elementary level learners.

When should you teach the Possessive Nouns lesson?

Possessive nouns help identify ownership — that something belongs to someone or something else. This lesson teaches students how to use an apostrophe followed by an s (‘s) for people, time words and without a noun. It also enables understanding of how to add an apostrophe after a plural noun that ends in -s, or names that end in -s.

The lesson is suitable for elementary level students and can be taught to children, teenagers and adults.

Our ESL lesson library also includes lessons on nouns and articles that will help prepare students for this material. We recommend three lessons — Subject Pronouns (N1.1), Object Pronouns (N2.1) and The Basic Use of the Verb to be (VS1.1) — as pre-requisites.

How to teach this lesson about Possessive Nouns

To help students understand this concept, this lesson spends a substantial portion of the slides walking through various examples of possessive nouns. Students will have plenty of opportunities to practice building sentences that include possessive nouns.

The slides are playful and illustrated with many pictures and fun examples to keep your student engaged and motivated.

The teacher notes offer additional questions and prompts, to encourage the student to speak even more. You can access the teacher notes for free by signing up for a free Off2Class account.

What Comes Next?

We know teaching the English language to new learners can be tricky. Therefore, we offer a wide selection of resources, training and content to help you succeed. Head to our youtube channel for more tutorials!

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