I was very fortunate back in 2004!  A student nominated me and I later received the Excellent Educator Award!  As part of the Award, I was invited to attend a workshop by Michael Clay Thompson.  He changed the way I teach grammar.  Instead of staying with each part of speech until mastery, he recommended that I teach everything about sentences within the first month of school.  And by “everything” I mean the eight parts of speech, the five parts of a sentence, phrases, types of sentences, and sentence structure.  Then I can spend the rest of the school year having the students analyze sentences and apply their knowledge.

My students and I have loved this format.  Each new sentence is like a puzzle and we use logic and knowledge to solve it.  This week we were ready and began the four level analysis that will now become part of our weekly routine.  In the first video, the students identify parts of speech.

In the next video the students go on to identify parts of the sentence (subject, predicate, subject complement), phrases (at this point they know only prepositional phrases), type of sentence (declarative), and finally sentence structure  (compound I, cc I).

With this kind of analysis happening all year long, the students will really get a much better sense of how sentences are built.  It will also give us some common ideas to talk about when discussing their writing.  Love it!