I did not introduce any new syntax this week, but wanted to measure how well Pamela understands prepositions. I embedded her interests by taking pictures of Beanie Babies. With prepositional phrases, one can word several questions for the same sentence. For example, with the sentence, "The snail is on the lion," the following three questions can prompt it:"Where is the snail?"
"On what is the snail?"
"What is on the lion?"
Pamela did a fantastic job this week! She answered all three variations correctly most of the time and could ask these kinds of questions too. Today, I gave her an extremely busy picture with twelve animals and accurately answered my questions nearly every time. Even better, she followed my lead and pulled out her stuffed animals when composing her own stories during the written narration.
We are lucky because Pamela has a huge vocabulary. Her main issue is not learning what words mean, but how to string them together with correct syntax. In talking to the folks over at Dubard, I gather that children take a long time to master prepositions because they must learn to read and pronounce the words, what they mean, different kinds of questions, and proper syntax. She only needs to work on the latter two of these four issues. Pamela has understood prepositions for years, and now she can use them in simple sentences and questions.
Mary's comment inspired me to outline the next six weeks of preposition work. And, after that, Pamela will get her first exposure to present tense verbs and then present progressive verbs, the final piece of syntax in Unit Two!
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