hi i'm ashley and this is mia
in this lesson we are going to learn about possessive nouns you ready let's go
you already know a lot about nouns they're words we use each time we want to name a
person place or thing like woman house and dog sometimes those nouns interact with each other
like what if the house belongs to the woman well we can say that house belongs to the woman
or what we would more likely say is that is the woman's house
notice we added an apostrophe and s to the noun woman to show that she owns or possesses the house
we call this a possessive form of the noun and we use it whenever we want to show ownership
now we've already learned about apostrophes apostrophes are the punctuation marks we use
when we form contractions like instead of saying she is we can use the contraction she's or instead
of saying we are we can use the contraction we're apostrophes and contractions are marking the spot
where a letter is missing in possessive nouns the apostrophe does not mark a spot where a letter is
missing instead the apostrophe is just attaching an s to let us know the word is possessive
the book that belongs to mia is called mia's book the apostrophe
and s show possession they show that the book belongs to mia
let's practice making some possessive nouns the shoes that belong to eva are called
ava's shoes the apostrophe and s are added to show possession
the ice cream that belongs to courtney is
courtney's ice cream again the apostrophe and s are added to show possession
there's another thing we need to learn about possessive nouns let's say there
are some blocks that don't just belong to one kid the blocks belong to the kids we've already
added an s to mean more than one kid so it would look kind of funny to add another s instead when
something belongs to a plural noun that ends with an s we just add the apostrophe we call this a
plural possessive now if we used the word children an irregular plural noun that does not have an
s at the end we wouldn't have to worry about that we would just write the children's blocks
let's do a little more practice if we have one dog and we're buying food for it we would call that
the dog's food but let's say the food we're buying is not just for one dog but for dogs
plural we are buying the dog's food since dogs is a plural noun
that ends with an s we just add the apostrophe to show possession we don't add another s
let's try another one let's say this person is working on a project
we would call it the person's project but what if we have multiple people working on a project
well then it would be the people's project even though people is a plural noun we would add an
apostrophe and an s because people is an irregular plural noun and it does not have an s at the end
there's one more thing we should mention about possessive nouns
some singular nouns end with the letter s like marcus here's marcus with his guitar
since marcus ends with an s we usually just add the apostrophe to write about marcus's guitar
but since marcus is singular you might see marcus's guitar with an apostrophe and an
s either way is considered correct when you have a singular noun that ends with s
so let's review what we've learned possessive nouns show ownership
or possession to make a noun possessive we add an apostrophe and an s
if the noun is a regular plural with an s at the end we just add the apostrophe
remember if a singular noun ends with an s we usually just add an apostrophe
and also remember to always be clever