Parts of a Sentence

I added a packet of worksheets on parts of a sentence to my store on TpT.  Here is the Note to the Teacher from that packet:

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