A Note
to the Teacher
To my mind,
understanding what sentences look like and how they function constitutes one of
the more important steps in becoming a proficient writer. Many students learn how to write through
reading. They absorb complex sentence
patterns simply by encountering them over and over again on the printed page. I like to think of the process as somewhat
akin to osmosis, whereby material appears to be absorbed through some magical
semi-permeable membrane into a student’s brain.
Most of us are not that fortunate, however, and to play at sentences the
way Eric Clapton plays the guitar takes years of practice and a good bit of technical
knowledge.
While I was
exposed to a great deal of grammar in high school, I didn’t really begin to understand
how to control my own sentences until I started teaching English in 1978, and
even then, I still had no idea how teaching parts of speech and parts of a
sentence would help my students write more effectively. Not until I began working almost exclusively
with middle school students, did I realize what role grammar played in the
teaching of writing. Students ought to
know the most basic grammatical terms in order to have conversations with their
teachers (and themselves) about what they want to say and how best to say it. How
do I tell a student that his particular sentence is a fragment because it is
missing a subject? How do I encourage
students to vary the structure of their sentences if they don’t know what a
participial phrase or a subordinate clause looks like? Mutual understanding of
parts of a sentence between students and teachers allows such conversations to
begin.
As I did in
the packet I created for parts of speech, I continue to tell stories in these
exercises on parts of a sentence. The
stories are meant to be funny and offbeat.
Most, although not all, of them concern animals that live on or near our
property and some of them describe events that actually happened. Some of them do not. I certainly hope your students enjoy the
exercises and in the process learn something about what sentences look like and
how they function.
Best
wishes,
Harper
