Little words cause the biggest problems. If we wish to enable students to analyze and discuss real texts, students need to distinguish "to" as a preposition from "to" as the sign of an infinitive. Note that the instructional material tells students that they are not expected to remember the term "infinitive." All they need to learn at this point is that if whatever answers the question "What?" after "to" is a noun or pronoun, they are dealing with a prepositional phrase and should put parentheses around it. If whatever answers the question is a verb, they should not.
     It takes some practice for most students to both remember this rule and learn to identify verbs. In a few cases, the distinction between verb and noun is ambiguous. Consider the sentence: "They went to sleep." If "to sleep" denoted their purpose for going, "sleep" is a verb; but if it means the state of being to which they went, it is a noun. (Note the implications of this for using "state of being" to identify verbs.) Fortunately, there are very few words that involve such ambiguities.

Exercises One (a and b): "To" -- Is It a Preposition?

     The primary reason for having students learn to distinguish “to” prepositional phrases from infinitives at this level is that prepositional phrases almost never function as subjects, predicate nouns, or direct objects. Infinitives do: 

Exercise Two: Verbs as Objects of Prepositions

     Originally, this exercise was to be about "to" plus a gerund -- which does create a prepositional phrase. For example, “She loves everything {from boating} {to fishing}.” In real texts, however, these are few and far between. Thus a ten-sentence exercise based on a real (long) text might include only four such sentences, the rest being reinforcements of exercises one and two. On the other hand, KISS Level 1.5 (on prepositional phrases) does not include an exercise on verbs as objects of prepositions. This exercise could go there, but Level 1.5 presents students with many other things to learn. 

      Fortunately, “to” phrases with gerunds as their objects are relatively rare. In collecting sentences for exercises from Sewell's Black Beauty, I was surprised by the number of sentences that included both "to" as a preposition and "to" as an infinitive. I had collected around forty such sentences when I stopped copying them. On the other hand, in the whole text I found only eight sentences in which "to" functions as a preposition with a gerund ("-ing" verb) as its object. In the Gutenberg edition of Spyri's Heidi, I found none.

     Thus this exercise has been redesigned. Each exercise includes at least one example of "to" plus a gerund, but the repetitions from exercises one and two have been replaced with other sentences that have gerunds as objects of prepositions:

     The exercise has been extended to include the even more infrequent constructions in which infinitives function as objects of prepositions:

     At this point in their work, students do not need to remember the terms "gerund" and "infinitive." (They are the primary focus of KISS Level Four.)
 

Exercise Three - "To" and "Too"

     “To” presents students with an additional problem in that they confuse it with “too.” As the instructional overhead explains, this results in errors that are readily noted by most readers, not just because they are “errors,” but because they lead the reader to expect something that does not appear (“Samantha wanted to go to.”) or hit the reader with a “what” when the reader does not expect it (“Samantha wanted to go too the park.”) 

     Some teachers claim that this is not a serious error, and that may be true. But the differences between “to” and “too” are not that difficult to understand. Thus, people who regularly use these words incorrectly give the impression of being either uneducated or lazy. As I tell my college Freshmen, misspellings of “to” and “too” have, and will continue to, make the difference between an A or a B (or a B and a C) on papers, not just in my English class, but also in papers for any other course. The errors are very noticeable, and they give the instructor the impression that the writer is not very careful or concerned with the paper.

Exercise Four - Treasure Hunt and/or Recipe Roster

      Like all KISS treasure hunts and/or recipe rosters, this one invites students to see that what they are learning clearly applies to randomly selected texts and/or to their own writing.
 

Suggested Directions for Analytical Exercises: 1. Place parentheses ( ) around each prepositional phrase. 2. Underline every finite verb twice, its subject(s) once, and label any complements (“PA,” “PN,” “IO,” or “DO”).

Probable Time Required:      This depends on how quickly your students can master the distinction. Two or three initial exercises would probably be a good idea, time permitting. Thereafter, you can expect some students to make mistakes until they finally get it.

Exercises in KISS Level 2.2.1