Simple subjects and simple predicates

[AimeeM]

My daughter is doing Hake 6. She is doing great but she keeps getting hung up on simple subjects and simple predicates. Every time. All the time. She flies through the rest and always gets *these two* wrong.

Any little jigs or anything I can give her to help her remember?

[Momling]

Schoolhouse rock does a cute song. You can do a search for "Mr. Morton" on you tube. Does she know the parts of speech and can pick out the nouns and verbs? You could give her an easy sentence to work with and then gradually complicate it...

The girl acted strangely.

The girl in the blue dress acted strangely.

The girl in the blue dress acted strangely when she discovered her pony was missing.

At high noon, the charismatic girl in the peacock blue dress acted strangely when she discovered her pony was missing.

 

And so on...

 

You could also make a table in MS word with three columns labelled "subject","verb", and "the rest of the sentence" (aka object or complement). Give her a few sample sentences to use as a template sentence and have her fill in the table with more sentences so that she begins to see that the subject (or compound subject) is in English, just before the verb. And we call the predicate everything from the verb over. You could point out the exception of some adverbs like "usually" can go between the subject and the verb.

 

 

Forgive me if this doesnt make sense... I'm using my phone to write this and it's the middle of the night.;-)

[Alte Veste Academy]

DS9 covered this in Voyages in English at the beginning of the year and struggled with it a bit too. We played a little game called Annoying Mom. :tongue_smilie: I worked on the sample sentences with him orally and whenever he named more than the SS or SP, I whined out "WHOOOOOOOO??? Did WHAAAAAAAT????" or "WHAAAAAAAAT??? Did WHAAAAAAAAT????" like a totally perplexed crazy person. It made him laugh...and get to the point. Somehow the exaggeration helped. I asked him, "If you were retelling the sentence to a two year old, which words would you pick."

[Colleen in NS]

My daughter is doing Hake 6. She is doing great but she keeps getting hung up on simple subjects and simple predicates. Every time. All the time. She flies through the rest and always gets *these two* wrong.

Any little jigs or anything I can give her to help her remember?

 

Have her memorize the definitions.

 

A simple subject is who or what the sentence is about.

A simple predicate is what the subject does or is.

 

When she's doing exercises, have her find the simple predicate first, and then find the simple subject by asking who or what about the simple predicate.

 

But I like the Annoying Mom game, too. :D