Blog #3

“Alyssa Writes her Blog”, if this were the title of an article ‘Alyssa’ would be the subject, ‘writes’ would be the verb, and ‘blog’ would be the object…meaning this title is a SVO, or subject-verb-direct object. When going through the newspapers this week and identifying whether different titles of articles were just subject-verb or subject-verb-direct object, I learned that sometimes you have to assume they left out a certain word, that could be the subject or something. For instance, I remember one of the article titles looked as if it had no subject, but by adding one word into the title all of a sudden there was a subject, you just sometimes have to assume who the author is directing the subject to, if it is not given.

Prepositional phrases are also starting to stick out to me more easily now. I remember learning prepositions and how my teacher helped us to learn them was by thinking about a box: If an object could be under, below, within, above, inside, or whatever about the box, then it was a preposition. I hated prepositions and I had no idea what my teacher was trying to teach me with this whole box thing back then. But now, after we have been going over all these article titles this past week I was able to identify prepositions and prepositional phrases so much easier than ever before. It was great!

What I’ve really been enjoying about our grammar class is how we are so interactive. I hate sitting in a class and being talked at…lectures literally kill me. But with our class, I love how Barbara will explain a little, but then she will just throw us right into practicing what we are discussing for the day. That is so much more helpful rather than just reading from a book what something is, at least for me.

It’s kind of like what the teacher in Dora did. She would let the kids work on their assignment with each other, trying to figure stuff out and what not, and then they would discuss their assignment and why they did certain things they did, like placing a period in a certain place. For us, we work together as tables to figure out different grammatical things in the newspaper articles and then go over it as a class and are able to see/hear other people’s perspectives on what they found, because they may have found something that another group may have not. I do enjoy working by MYSELF, but I really enjoying working with others and being able to get another’s opinion or perspective on something that I may not be sure about.

BETWEEN YOU AND ME, I may think that I am good at grammar, but being in this class for the past few weeks has made me realize I have a lot more to learn/master.