6/16--a little bit o' class and a little bit o' library

Wow, today was packed with stuff.  We started off by reviewing process and making sure we remembered the importance of keeping each step in chronological order.  Check Scary Chapter 12 for some more review/extra practice. 

Then we moved on to sentences: a group of words made up of a subject and a verb and that expresses a complete thought.  Today, we spent most of the time considering SUBJECTS

Subjects-usually the "who" or "what" the sentence is about.  Almost always, subjects are nouns or pronouns.  Subjects normally appear in the beginning of the sentence since most sentences in English follow a Subject/Verb/Object order.  Consider the following sentence:

• Beatrice spent her money wisely

In this sentence, we can see that Beatrice is the one who is doing action (spending), so we can assume she is the subject of the sentence.  We also know that Beatrice is a subject because she is a noun (sidenote: yes, money is a noun too, however, money is the thing being spent--it is the object of the sentence--so it is not really the focal point of the sentence). 

One thing that can cause problems in finding the subject of the sentence is if there is a prepositional phrase in the sentence. 

Prepositional phrase: a group of words that starts with a preposition and ends with its object.  Prepositions are often directional words that point to a time or place in regards to the object.  Check out this list of prepositions. 

Once we can identify the prepositional phrase, we can cross it out of a sentence to help us find the actual subject because even though a noun or pronoun will be hiding in the prep. phrase, the subject will NEVER live there. 

• In 1851 in Rochester, New York, Western Union had its beginning. 
• Messages were transmitted by Morse code and delivered by couriers. 
• Eventually, telegraph service drove the Pony Express out of business. 

For more practice, check out Scary page 42-43

We also went to the library for some research work. If you missed class, make sure to head to the library and talk to one of the librarians about all the wonderful resources they have! 

Finally today, we worked on reading process paragraphs.  Look to the examples in the post from yesterday for details!