R&S Q: How did you get your kids to ask the simple quesitons to find

[Gamom3]

the direct object, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, etc..?


We have been doing R&S for a few years, so they know the questions to ask, but to get them to ask them is worse than getting them to eat new foods!:banghead:

Ds had a diagramming worksheet to do today. One question had 2 verbs with 2 direct objects. He looks at me and ask how to do them, I told him he has done them before, he said he hasn't. I showed him a simple sentence that had a subject,verb and direct object and diagrammed it. He looks at me and says that the one he is doing has two. I ask him to label the sentence before he diagrams and he does and see that he has 2 verbs, he then remembered the fork and then sat there not remember what to do with the D.O.

Is there a good diagramming book to go along with R&S that covers what is done in books 4(dd) and 5(ds)? They do the extra worksheets, so that will not work unless I just have them redo what is in them.

I am making flash cards from the "remember box" in the book.

PS:
I am not like Janice in NJ, who did an AWESOME JOB!:hurray: I couldn't just pull them out of a book. I know what my kids are doing in their R&S books and I do great with the sentences in the book. But if I put to much thought into the sentences, I start questioning myself.

[Kelli in TN]

Hmmm, we don't have that problem but let me think....if we did.....

There is a diagramming book you might like, Mary Daly's Whole Book of Diagrams (http://hedgeschool.homestead.com/diagrams.html).

Also, you might make posters with reminders and hang them up wherever you do school. Perhaps you could have a giant diagram of a sentence that contains all of the parts of a sentence with which the children are struggling. You could even go so far as to color code the words and at the bottom of your poster you could have the color key explanation as well as the pertinent questions they need to ask to identify the sentence parts.

The girl I tutor lacks a good grammar foundation. So even though she is in eleventh grade, I have to remind her over and over again of the basics. One trick I have is to keep a small, soft handball nearby. Everytime she messes up direct object and indirect object I throw the ball at her head. After it hits her head she has to tell me the sentence for what just happened (Mrs. Kelli threw the ball to Dani. Who threw the ball? What was Mrs. Kelli's action? Who or what received the action? so on and so forth). She laughs, but she is getting better.

I think sometimes kids have a great deal of trouble understanding the basics when they don't see HOW it applies. I am that way with math!!! The beauty of what Janice shared with us is that she made the connection from textbook to life. As teachers, we need to be doing that in large ways, like Janice did, and in small ways, like I do when I conk my student on the head with the ball.