Vie Miller TS#8

For my next lesson with Song, I typed up a short paragraph that she had hand-written about St. George Island (see previous post) and analyzed it in-depth for grammar errors. I created a list before the lesson, and I hoped that we’d get a chance to go through and correct all the errors that she had made. I was perhaps overly ambitious--we only got through commas, gerunds, and proper vs. common nouns. Still, I think it was a really good lesson, and by the end, Song had a better grasp of the difference between gerunds and verbs as well as common nouns and proper nouns. Strangely enough, we spent the most time on capitalization in proper nouns vs. common nouns because of a cultural misunderstanding. I wrote down ‘soda’ as an example of a common noun and Coca-Cola as an example of a proper noun Song became very confused, and I only learned later that she thought soda mean Sprite as well as all other sodas that were not Coca-Cola. The lesson here may be this: don’t shoot from the hip, but pick out your examples beforehand.