Mine Too!

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Home : 2002 : April : 23

Mine Too!
By Teri

I just completed teaching subject and predicate to 3rd graders. I did it over 5 days. First, I introduced the concept, like you did, by using a table. On one side it said "Who or what?" and on the other side it said (something
like) "Is or Doing?". After going through many example of sentences, I introduced the words subject and predicate.
Then I isolated the subject and the predicate. For two days, we did subject only. First, we did simple subject and then we did compound subject. Accordingly, the next two days we did simple predicate and compound predicate. Each day we would review what we

had learned the days before.

Personally I think it's easier to understand the predicate because that's where the action is happening. I don't know any tricks and I certainly would have tried them. One teacher suggested, using sentence strips, have the students connect the subject and the predicate. I guess you could also have the kids connect words from a word wall to create sentences.

After all that, my class average on the quiz was 71%. Some kids "got it" and some kids didn't. I will touch back and review, but (in my opinion) it's a difficult concept for the kids to understand.

How can a verb be a "what" if it's an action? Ask the students to think about the definition for a verb. Maybe reviewing the definition for nouns, pronouns, and verbs (including be verbs) would help the students.

AACCKK! I didn't mean to get so wound up. I probably wouldn't have had so much to write if I hadn't just taught it. :-) Keep at it and I believe most of 'em will eventually get it. Good luck!