Back to course description Language Rules: Building Blocks gives talented students in grades 5-8 a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of grammar. The course explores parts of speech, how they function as components of sentences, and how to use that knowledge to make their writing more vivid, effective, and interesting.
This lesson discusses the distinctions between concrete and abstract nouns, count nouns and non-count nouns, and how to tell if a word in a sentence is a noun or another part of speech. Students will practice replacing general nouns with more specific nouns in order to write more vividly.
Topics include transitive and intransitive verbs, action verbs and verbs of state. Students learn syntactic features of verbs and apply tests to determine whether the word in a sentence is a verb or another part of speech. Students practice replacing general verbs with more specific verbs in order to make their sentences more dynamic.
As in lessons 1 and 2, this lesson discusses the complexities of these parts of speech, applying tests to determine features of each part of speech. As with verbs, a key topic will be how to replace general modifiers (like “good”) with more specific modifiers that create more effective descriptions. Adverbial and adjectival phrases will also be covered.
This lesson focuses on the distinction between parts of speech and parts of sentences. Students transition from distinguishing classes of words to studying the roles that subjects, predicates, and phrases play in the construction of sentences. Students also examine the role prepositional phrases play in determining subject/verb agreement. A deeper understanding of sentence parts prepares students for further practice with complex sentence patterns.
The lesson discusses the structure of simple, compound and complex sentences. Students practice punctuating sentences correctly while focusing on using a variety of sentence patterns and rhythms in their writing. (.pdf 177 Kb) | 
