Teaching Subject and Predicate

Every year, teaching subject and predicate is challenging. Students choose every noun in the sentence as the subject and have difficulty with those predicates which contain helper verbs rather than action. This year, I got a crazy notion to go deeper into the standard and teach complete versus simple subjects and predicates. It is my hope that by teaching this, I will inspire my students to write more complex and complete sentences. I have found that the best way to learn this is through repetitive practice using student generated sentences. So, I set out to have my students make a subject/predicate pumpkin.

Prior to this activity, I had taught simple subject and predicate and created an anchor chart with the students. The students had practiced this skill in classwork and homework. Then we learned complete subject and predicate and practiced that, too. We added to our anchor chart to learn the difference.

Finally, as a culminating activity to this section of study, I gave the instructions for our sentence strip pumpkin Here are the instructions I gave the students:

We started writing on our sentence strips. After the student wrote a sentence on their strip that followed all of our requirements, they brought it to myself and my parent/student teaching helper to have it checked. If it was correct, they got a new sentence strip. We made a paper chain with the strips and put them on our board to make our pumpkin. Below the pumpkin you can see our anchor charts. The students were excited to write a lot of sentences to make the pumpkin bigger. They would have kept going, but I needed to call the lesson to a close for lunch. Students like to go to the pumpkin and point out one of their sentences in the chain.

It was a fun project that added some holiday flavor to our walls. So, for now anyway, we are moving on from subject and predicate... although I know we will be back!