September 23, 2007
A Request for Your Help
For the first time on my blog (and it certainly won’t be the last), I’m asking for my readers help. Currently, I’m teaching a developmental reading and writing course (developmental is the term we now use to define courses that we used to call “remedial), and my students are really struggling with understanding subjects and verbs. I have tried two or three ways to explain these ideas to them, but they seem lost about how to identify these parts of speech.
What ways, if any, have any of you educators (or readers) had for teaching these concepts to students? Has anyone had a particularly successful tactic?
Thanks for your help.
Filed by Andi at 6:02 pm under Teaching Triumphs and Travails
2 Comments
I use physical props: a wooden mask, a stuffed animal, (a live animal: don’t laugh, many grammar school classrooms have live mascots!)If you forget props, use shoes. Shoes (with feet in them) can do many things. So can hands.
Students may even free write about what their hands can do.
Identify each object as the noun.
What can it do? Students must each give an example. Prof. make the list on the board, and say: “these are verbs.”
Can extend this: subject, verb, direct object.
“Okay, what can the mask do to the fish?”
To make sure they really get it, ask students to write 2 sentences using a noun and a verb of their own choice.
Karen,
Thanks. I’m trying this tomorrow.
A