Hands On Grammar

Yesterday afternoon I decided to stop "beating a dead horse".  Our second child, "The Bunny", struggles with memorization and "flat" learning. After 5 years of grammar instruction, using several curricula, she still struggles to define and label the parts of speech and parts of a sentence. While she can diagram a sentence, she cannot describe what she is doing or why. It is way past time to try something more creative, but I have never seen anything affordable and manageable to make grammar hands-on. Taking some ideas I have seen in grammar books and at conventions, I constructed a hand on, multi-sensory way to diagram a sentence.  We had our first trial run this morning.  Hopefully over time, we will achieve mastery, if not even some enjoyment.

I used sentence strips to create color-coded pockets labeled with each part of speech and its definition.

I tried to keep similar colors with types of words that work together. So nouns are red and adjectives orange; verbs are dark green and adverbs light green.

I used another sentence strip to make a diagram skeleton with the subject in yellow and predicate in green (correlating to the verbs). There is a movable vertical half-line so that it can be used for direct objects, predicate adjectives or predicate nominatives. It is paper clipped now, but will be attached with a brass brad when I buy some.

I then made labels which fit into the pockets to further identify specifically what each word does.  There are labels to distinguish action, linking, helping and state of being verbs (in green); direct and indirect objects (in green to show they are affected by the action of the verb); predicate adjectives and nominatives (in yellow to show they modify the subject).

Finally I created word cards including: all the helping, linking and state-of-being verbs and prepositions she has memorized, basic forms of nouns and action verbs, adverbs, adjectives (including articles), interjections, and conjunctions.  I am also making "rings" that can fit over the cards to change endings. I have several "-s" and " -'s" finished, but will be adding "-ed", "-ing", "-es", "-ies", "-er", "-est" and "-ly".

This morning, I had The Bunny create her own sentence using the words I made. We will add her own words eventually. She came up with "My pink snow sings." (Silly is just more fun!)

We then put each word into its Part of Speech Pocket with any appropriate labels:

Finally we were ready to diagram the sentence.

I created some sentences for her:

"Tiny babies quickly eat milk."

"They could quickly complete school."

Once these simple sentences become easy and she can explain why each word is labeled and placed correctly, we will work up to more complex sentence structures.  At the very least, there were no tears or frustration with grammar this morning and all the children wanted to get in on it. Maybe grammar can be fun!