day 44: examining caves more closely--subject

If you learn that a sentence contains five things—and you learn to recognize these things easily, you will learn to evaluate whether every sentence you write is a “real” sentence or not more easily.

Remember, CAVES is the acronym we will use to examine a sentence.

C apital

A ll makes sense

V erb

E nd mark

S ubject

The last letter of CAVES—subject—is what we will examine today. Each “simple sentence”—that is, each “real” sentence must contain a subject. We will call this the sentence’s main subject—because a sentence may contain other subjects in other parts, but a sentence must only contain one subject (the main subject) to be a real sentence.

Tomorrow we will learn the details of a sentence’s main subject—the S of CAVES—subject--each sentence must have a subject.

day 39: more on caves—five parts of a sentence

When you write, it is vital that you know what is and what is not a
sentence.

A sentence must have five things in order to be complete:

            1. Capital at the beginning

            a. The first letter of the first word in a sentence must be
capitalized.

            b. It does not matter what the first word is; it is always
capitalized.

For example: A kindergarten child is so cute.

            2. All makes sense

            a. A sentence must make sense.

            b. If a phrase has four of the other things a sentence must
have, but it leaves you hanging and does not make sense, then it is not a
sentence.

Examples:

                        1) When the boy ran. This is not a complete sentence
because it leaves you hanging.

                        2) The boy ran though the woods. This is a complete
sentence because it has all five things a sentence must have.

            3. Verb

            a. A sentence must have a verb (action or BHL—being verb, helping verb, linking verb).

            b. This tells what the subject does or is.

For example: The boys played football in the snow.

            4. End mark

            a. A sentence must have ending punctuation: 

                        1) a period (.)

                        2) an exclamation point (!)

                        3) question mark (?)

            b. Examples:

                        1) The boys are playing football.

2) Watch out for the football!

3) Are they playing football?

            5. Subject

            a. A sentence must have a subject.

            b. This is what or whom the sentence is about.

 The following acronym will help you to remember these five things:

Capital at the beginning

All makes sense

Verb

End mark

Subject

day 38: parts of a sentence--caves

Now that “word” month is over (January) and January’s “homework help” week-plus is over, we can turn our attention to February’s topic—phrases, sentences, and clauses.

It has been said that when a banker or a counterfeit money “agent” learns about counterfeit money, he or she begins by learning what the real thing looks like. We use this same approach to teach about sentences, clauses, and phrases in our language arts books: teach the students what a real sentence looks like—and then teach what are not real sentences.

Thus, we will also start with sentences here on LL 365 and work backwards.

 We will begin with a simple acronym that we use to teach students the five things a sentence must contain in order to be a sentence:

CAVES

C  apital letter

A  ll makes sense

V  erb

E  nd mark

S  ubject

We will learn more about sentences throughout February, but for now, if you write a sentence and you are unsure of whether it is a “real” sentence, use CAVES.

When a sentence is not a "real" sentence, the culprit is usually the A one—All makes sense. And that “A” one will take us into sentences vs. phrases and clauses…on another day. Happy writing!