Almost there!

I still have all of my Schoolhouse Rock videos even though I no longer have a VHS player because I refused to let my parents get rid of them. So I would definitely say I was excited to see the videos as the majority of our readings for the week. These are great examples of a way to get students engaged in grammar, by putting it in a format that they can relate to and see as something fun, rather than a list of rules printed in black and white. Music is an educational tool that has been proven time and time again to help students remember material, so I’m all for these videos and developing lessons involving them.

My Grammar Girl podcast this week was “Sentence Fragments”. She quotes the line “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” This makes complete sense to me, because varying sentence lengths in writing is difficult, and I know a lot of people struggle with run-on sentences and/or fragments. The basic rule is you can’t make a sentence without a subject and a verb, but many make the mistake of trying to use a dependent clause as a sentence, usually because there is a subordinate conjunction at the beginning causing it to become a fragment.

Poetry isn’t my most comfortable area of writing, but here’s my preposition poem anyway.

Into the sky flew the red balloon.

Watching with awe, the boy stared at the heavens.

What a magnificent journey it must take, he thought,

Flying over the birds, and floating between the clouds.

According to Papa a balloon’s journey never ends,

The eye is just too weak to see beyond the sun.

On days just like this they’d release a single balloon,

And watch it drift past the trees and up toward space.

But this day was different from the others.

Papa was among the balloons this time.

I thought this was a really creative lesson, and I could definitely see myself incorporating in my classroom. I started by picking a directional preposition, and just went from there. It would also be cool to see what could become of a poem like this with time and revision.