October 15, 2017 I was in total shock. The last time I taught a basic lesson about nouns, verbs, subjects, and predicates, the class (or at least most of them) understood. I consider the subject to be an easy review because 4th grade students should have received instruction on the basic parts of speech and sentence structure for several grades. This class is just the opposite from my last. After reading the textbook and going over the practice, many of them were not able to identify nouns. So it wasn't surprising that when I taught about subjects, many couldn't identify the subject of a sentence because subjects are nouns (or pronouns). The last group liked using colors to identify parts of speech. I think I will keep that. But, I am going to do something that I haven't done in decades. I am going to introduce sentence diagramming to see if that will help. I found a few of my old English books (sentence diagramming hasn't been taught for decades) but n