Slice of Life.
There are days when the whole doesn’t divide easily. It seems impossible to cut neatly between the minutes and slide out a slice. Like a yeast roll it tears apart, or like a flaky biscuit it crumbles. My present days are like that. I’m in my studio most of the day, creating virtual lessons for blended instruction. I’m wired for sound, under bright lights, with a document camera and two monitors as companions. Video by video, I am progressing through my grammar boot camp lessons.
One of the guiding principles for my sentence lessons comes from a 19th century grammar textbook:
The simple declarative sentence is the building block of all composition.
And so, in the last several days, I’ve worked from the simple declarative sentence to the compound sentence [ I wrote about modeling this lesson in a classroom: “Simple to Compound” ], to the complex sentence, to the compound-complex sentence. Today, I recorded the comparative sentence. It’s one of my favorite sentences. A rare one to find in literature. A rare one to use.
* * * * *
Mordicai Gerstein’s The Old Country is one of my favorite books, a fairy tale-like allegorical novel about a holocaust. [ I found a wonderful poem in the Prelude: “In the Old Country“. ] In the beginning of the tale, Gisella, hunting for a fox, the one who has stolen their chickens, enters a magical woods. She believes she has found the fox’s home. And so, she settles down with her crossbow pointed at the hole and waits.
In the text, Gerstein builds suspense, and one of his tools to craft suspense and bring Gisella face to face with the fox is a comparative sentence.
It was now dim and gray, the air damp and chill. From time to time, she felt the distant thumps. She was hungry but afraid to move. She waited. The longer she waited, the more she felt someone was watching her–someone behind her. Someone with yellow eyes. Gisella turned her head slowly and there was the fox, close enough that Gisella could see her whiskers twitch. She sat and looked directly into Gisella’s eyes.
* * * * *
The comparative sentence:
The longer she waited, the more she felt someone was watching her–someone behind her.
It consists of two interdependent clauses separated ever so slightly by a comma and linked by adverb phrases in the comparative degree ( the longer / the more ).
Ah, the comparative sentence is a very rare gem!
In my studio.
Located in a corner of our basement, where the sounds of life and the vision of the sky cannot reach, is my recording studio. My guys set up a system for me, one that is super easy for me to use. I walk into the studio with my laptop, plug in its power cord, attach a single cable to it that connects it to the system, and turn all on with one switch. Two other switches turn on the studio lights. I adjust them with a remote control, slip my microphone onto my ear, and adjust and set the focus of my document camera with a button. In less than five minutes, I am ready to record… at least as far as the equipment is concerned.
My workstation in my studio upon completion of the anchor lesson video
The notebook page created during the anchor lesson
Two comparative sentences from literature analyzed in the anchor lesson
Head over to Two Writing Teachers for more slice of life stories #SOL18
First of all, let me say that I think I need to be in your boot camp! I, along with many others who commented, would love to hear more about this boot camp. Please let me know when it is completed. I commend you for teaching grammar in such a fun way and with mentor authors.
Thank you! I will let you know. We plan release it by July. I am soooo excited. It is like writing a book. I’ll probably share more slices about it between now and then as it is consuming a lot of my time and thinking.
Ooh – I am interested in this material. I’ve just started using sentence imitation as my grammar beginning lessons again after a hiatus. It’s been a while, but I love how much it allows students to learn without requiring them to master all the grammar language first, so I’m back. I bet your grammar boot camp is wonderful. Do keep us informed!!
I will, Amanda. Thank you for saying so. I love sentence imitation…. I’ve done it for years. I call it “Ape the Author” … a phrase from Robert Louis Stevenson’s description of how he developed his writing skills.
Thanks for sharing this lesson with us too. I learned new ideas I did not really know. Although I may have used a comparative sentence before I had to to go back to find the adverbs.
You are so welcome. Thanks for sharing that with me.
Wow! This is amazing and impressive. What a great way to teach grammar – and kids can revisit them
Yep! 🙂
In these days of texting and using shortcuts and made up abbreviations I fear so much sentence structure is being lost. A grammar boot camp is surely needed. I love that you give examples of your lessons.
Thank you! I’ve had so many teachers ask me to teach the boot camp for them. I did 4 cohorts for just teachers 2 years ago… about 150 teachers altogether.
Your piece fascinates me. I clicked on it because I have a student who has a production studio in his basement and now I can’t wait to show him your set-up. After reading the first three lines, I knew I was reading a post by a skilled writer:
It seems impossible to cut neatly between the minutes and slide out a slice. Like a yeast roll it tears apart, or like a flaky biscuit it crumbles.
Such lovely imagery!
And then to learn that you are making grammar videos – I’m impressed by your awareness of kinds of sentences. I just tend to read, never naming HOW the words join to form a kind of sentence. Thanks for the illuminating post!
Thank you, Sally. I’d love to hear what your student thought about my studio. I should have taken the photo so the lights showed too.
Your lessons hold so much for me as a writer and a teacher/coach. The lead is so strong- the metaphor of slice v. Tearing. THank you describing your studio.
I don’t know where that lead came from… it just fell onto my page as I thought about slice and food. Maybe I was hungry. 🙂
I am wired
for sound,
for voice,
for the connection of here
to there, from me
to you, from now
to then.
I am the sharer
of ideas, stored
for now
in a local domain,
my words
tumbling into bytes,
a kaleidoscope of
ones and zeroes,
soon to be transformed
into audible
for your ears only.
Wire me for sound.
I am ready
to transmit.
— Kevin, doing a bit of line-lifting. I love the “this is how I did it” stories.
Like. Like. Like it. Thank you, Kevin. Your line-lifting is always so much fun to read,
I really liked this, as we grow older grammar becomes such an integral part of our language that we don’t deliberately think about it, we just know if something is wrong. Thank you 🙂
It is true for those who read a lot and read quality text. They know something is right or wrong or more effective because it sounds or feels right without knowing why it is. However, it is my experience that knowing the why has given me more power with revision. And I also read the writing of others with an analytical lens to learn how they crafted a sentence, a passage and then to imitate the technique or even modify it to make it unique.
Very true. My son has done his PhD in English literature and he says the same.
I love that declaration from the old grammar book. I taught junior high (middle school) two years in the mid-eighties and was tasked w/ teaching lots of grammar, so I took the same approach and found it helpful to teach students subordinating conjunctions by showing them how to use them at the beginning, in the middle, and at the ends of sentences. The kids did a great job transferring the skills to essays. We played lots of games to make grammar fun.
Thank you, Glenda! Taught skillfully, students do transfer the knowledge and develop their skills.
Grammar boot camp lessons? I’d like to hear more about this project…sounds interesting. I love your sound studio setup. Teaching grammar and sentence construction is very challenging, but it seems like you’ve got a unique and effective approach.
It has gone through a long “life cycle.” It started as a teacher binder shared in my workshops from my classroom to other teachers. Other materials and binders and workshops followed. Online trainings followed. And now… with the blended instruction approach, I’m creating material that, as one teacher put it, make it possible for her to take me in her pocket to her classroom every day and team teach with her. It is exciting.