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conuly
Ana had a worksheet on verbs for today, the first one I've seen her do.
This is what it says at the top: "A verb tells what people or things do. More generally, a verb tells the action a noun or pronoun does."
1. Ana does not admit to any firm knowledge of what nouns or pronouns are, mind, but it's a subject we can work on.
2. This is far from the best definition of "verb" I've ever seen... but for first graders just beginning to learn this sort of thing, it probably doesn't matter. Except...
3. They were supposed to underline the verbs in various different sentences. And in each sentence, afterwards, we were helpfully told how many verbs were in the sentence. And almost all the verbs that Ana was supposed to identify weren't "action" verbs!
Has to (where dollars to doughnuts she's only supposed to identify "has", although the has in "she has a bed" is very different from the has in "she has to go to bed", which is the sentence she had), is (several times), will be (this is two verbs, of course), be, was.... Do and did I guess imply some action, but really, is a beginner gonna pick up on them?
Worse, some of the sentences had words that are verbs in ONE context, but not in others - "the play" and "be quiet".
The sample sentence lists "can" as a verb. Tell me, what sort of action is implied by "can"? If you're going to have them jump in with helping verbs and various conjugations of "to be", give them a better definition than "it tells what people or things do". Because when you do that, kids expect, well, to see things being done!
Instead of bothering about that, which didn't make sense to her, I told her that a verb can come after "I" or "she", and that if it comes right after "the", "a", or "an" it's probably safe to say it's not a verb. (Let's not talk about gerunds and all, okay?)
This is what it says at the top: "A verb tells what people or things do. More generally, a verb tells the action a noun or pronoun does."
1. Ana does not admit to any firm knowledge of what nouns or pronouns are, mind, but it's a subject we can work on.
2. This is far from the best definition of "verb" I've ever seen... but for first graders just beginning to learn this sort of thing, it probably doesn't matter. Except...
3. They were supposed to underline the verbs in various different sentences. And in each sentence, afterwards, we were helpfully told how many verbs were in the sentence. And almost all the verbs that Ana was supposed to identify weren't "action" verbs!
Has to (where dollars to doughnuts she's only supposed to identify "has", although the has in "she has a bed" is very different from the has in "she has to go to bed", which is the sentence she had), is (several times), will be (this is two verbs, of course), be, was.... Do and did I guess imply some action, but really, is a beginner gonna pick up on them?
Worse, some of the sentences had words that are verbs in ONE context, but not in others - "the play" and "be quiet".
The sample sentence lists "can" as a verb. Tell me, what sort of action is implied by "can"? If you're going to have them jump in with helping verbs and various conjugations of "to be", give them a better definition than "it tells what people or things do". Because when you do that, kids expect, well, to see things being done!
Instead of bothering about that, which didn't make sense to her, I told her that a verb can come after "I" or "she", and that if it comes right after "the", "a", or "an" it's probably safe to say it's not a verb. (Let's not talk about gerunds and all, okay?)
