14th class
meeting, Spring 2005
Class Activities: Today Chris analyzed sentences to determine parts of speech, starting with the simplest of sentences (“Birds sing”) to show that sentences could have very little as long as there is a noun and a verb of some sort and moving to slightly longer ones.
On the screen, Chris would have a simple sentence, pointing out the noun and verb, and then had the students add their own adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases on a piece of paper. Then Chris would ask them for their sentences and show them what he had written. The students seemed to love this exercise; they showed great creativity in their descriptions (some using the vocabulary they had learned online) and many were excited to share their sentences with the class.
Then, with sentences displayed on the screen, he had the students look through each sentence (all of which had prepositional phrases) to count the nouns. With this exercise, he first asked about which noun was the focus of the sentence, the most important noun, and from there began distinguishing the nouns in prepositional phrases from the main noun and reviewing the various types of nouns (concrete, abstract, pronouns, and proper nouns). He had students go through and remove all the descriptions (the prepositional phrases, adjectives, and adverbs) to hone down what would be left of the sentence. Starting with this exercise is more effective than jumping straight into picking out prepositional phrases. Students can begin by creating sentences and then go on to deconstruct the sentence for its parts. By their seeing all this on the screen (the slow building of each sentence from simple subject and verb to a more fully developed sentence) and then going backwards to eliminate the description, students gain a firmer understanding of the material. In my third day of covering/reviewing subjects, verbs, and prepositional phrases, a couple of students are still having some difficulty with longer sentences, but Chris’s students appear to be moving along easily with this very important foundational material.