Sentence Analysis
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As students master the parts of speech, they also begin the process of sentence analysis. Up until now, students have read sentences and discovered the parts of speech that go into sentences, but now, as Maria Montessori says in The Advanced Montessori Method, "The child begins to see what a sentence is: that is, he begins to concentrate on this particular question. How many times he has read sentences, pronounced sentences, and composed sentences! But now he is examining them in detail, studying them. The simple sentence is a short proposition, with completed meaning, which expresses an action or a situation, organizing its different parts around a verb."
Students create their own sentences, and then use them to learn the name of the function that each part of speech performs. They learn that the function of each depends on the position of the part of speech in the sentence. Through simple questions, students can identify the predicate, subject, direct object, and indirect object. This enables students to gain an understanding of the abstract concepts involved in sentence structure. |
To the left, we see the questions posed during the sentence analysis activity.
To the right, the pieces have been flipped over to reveal the parts of the sentence that students have been able to identify through answering the questions.
The above is only the beginning. Student then consider additional questions about their subject, predicate, and direct/indirect object (when? why? how? by whom?), which lead them to identify other parts of the sentence (time, cause, manner, agent).