Subject/Verb/Object

This week I didn't completely learn a new skill, but I did learn a new part of the structure of sentences. I have never really struggled with the subject-verb-object order of a sentence, and I rarely mess up on subject/verb agreement, but I did not know that there was a different name for a verb if no object followed it!

I'm sure I had heard the terms 'verb-transitive' and 'verb-intransitive' somewhere along the journey of my grammar education, but I don't think I have ever been able to apply them to what I was doing. It was very helpful to break down the different sentences and take out the adjectives and adverbs, and even the object itself, to change the structure of a sentence but still keep the meaning the same. However, while doing this, we did come across a few exceptions that end in a different meaning do to suggested meaning of words (ie. uses). BUT, even with this, I still found the lesson to be very helpful and I learned a lot about transitive and intransitive verbs!

However, though I enjoyed the lesson and felt like I learned something new about verbs, I think that parsing sentences in general is helpful in understanding proper grammar. It would be interesting to have my future students do an activity like this in class because they would be able to pick out the different parts of speech, and perhaps I would have them substitute words to see if they actually understood the lesson or if they were just assuming that the first word was the subject, the second was the verb, and so on. I think it would be a good way to assess learning without the activity seeming too overwhelming.

I also feel as though this is a lesson that I will be able to use in my future classrooms. I am constantly looking around for fun and interesting ways to teach grammar so that it actually sticks with the students, and I think breaking down a sentence in this way might be just the ticket to success! I think that this has been the most applicable lesson so far and that it would be easy to modify for use in a high school classroom. The lesson on apostrophes might seem to overwhelming, but even with the oddities in this one, I think it would be easy for students to pick up fairly quickly. Also, since sentence structure is the basis for writing, it will help them in the long run to learn the basics of it right off the bat! Students won't only benefit in their English courses, but any classes that also assign writing (which should be most other classes) would find use of this lesson.

However, after ending up with "Seth uses" and its double-meaning in our mature class, I wonder, how will high school students take the odd exceptions to converting a sentence from transitive to intransitive? Are there very many cases like the one we faced on Thursday?