Sentence - John was running. What is running?
Back story, I am a part-time Resource Room teacher at a small parochial school. I was helping a fifth grader today with his ELA. The assignment was diagramming sentences. The teacher told the students what to look for in each sentence - gerund, direct object, prepositional phrase. This sentence was on the assignment sheet.
The sentence "John was running." was marked as having a predicate nominative/predicate adjective. I was surprised and asked the teacher. She said running is a gerund and is acting as the predicate nominative. Silly me, I thought "was running" was past progressive, was running was the simple predicate.
Can someone please explain it to me? I feel so silly but I don't see "running" in that sentence as a predicate nominative.