WHERE DOES EACH BELONG?
Notes
This type of exercise
should be excellent as an introduction to basic logic. KISS is based on
a fundamental concept from the logic of David Hume. He claims that every
logical relationship falls into one of three categories – identity, extension
(in time or space), or cause/effect. How these categories relate to the
study of sentence structure is developed in much more detail in the upper
grades, but here we might simply note that "Who? and "What?" are questions
of identity. "When?" and "Where?" are questions of extension in time and
space. Hume was assuming an Aristotelian concept of cause in which the
manner in which something was done ("How?") was considered one of several
causes for what was done.
The directions in the
assignment are straight from the original, but you might want to modify
them. First, this could be a good small group exercise. Assign each group
one (not two) of the headings, but have at least five groups so that each
heading is covered. Then have the groups report their results to the class.
You might also want
to have the students identify the typical grammatical functions of the
"groups" of words in their lists. For example, "an Indian squaw" is a noun
phrase, "along the street" is a prepositional phrase, and "suddenly" is
an adverb. (The subordinate clause "when snowflakes fall" will probably
confuse them.) When they finish, don't forget to point out that the words
and phrases in the "Who" and "What" lists tend to be nouns, whereas those
in the "When," "Where," and "How" lists tend to be adverbs or prepositional
phrases. Gently stress the importance of including "when," "where," and
"how" words in their own writing.
Although this exercise
does not directly address this, you might want to have students look (treasure
hunt) for sentences that include both "where" and "when" words or phrases.
They are fairly common in narratives – "In the park on Sunday, we played
baseball." (In the 1980's there was a push to get students to increase
the length of their sentences by having them do sentence-combining exercises.
Sentence-combining can be problematic, in part because the content in exercises
is often meaningless. Adding prepositional phrases of place and time almost
tripled the length of "we played baseball.") |