piano competition

The girl behind me won the piano competition.

This was a sentence in my Language book. I'm just gonna walk you all through it in case you're not fluent in grammar :)

Girl= subject
won= verb ---> it's an action verb which means a Direct Object could come after it. you have to ask who or what did the girl win? ....
piano competition= direct object


OK so that leaves the- always an adjective- and 'behind me'. This last week, I had tutoring after school with a couple kids and we were going through sentences like this. I got to this sentence and got all the major things nailed down and then started in on 'behind me'. We've learned that a prepositional phrase has a preposition and an object of preposition- a noun after the preposition. I told one of the girls 'behind' was a preposition. Then I said,
"ok so in a PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE we need a preposition, which we know is behind. We also need a noun after to be the OP. What is our OP?"

"me"
"nice job. ok now what our prepositional phrase?"
"won"
"nope...."
"um, girl"
"no.... we've already said girl is the subject"
"the?"
"ok... think about this please, don't just answer- for a prepostional phrase, we need a preposition and an OP. what did you tell me the preposition was?"
"behind"
"uh huh, and the OP?"
"me"
"Ok! So, since we need a preposition (pointing to behind) and an OP (pointing to me)to make a prepostional phrase... what is the PREPOSTIONAL PHRASE?"
"competition?"

bahhhhhhhhh....... ;)so fun!

it happens to the best of us...

My kids have been writing back and forth with a 5th and 6th grade class from a school in Chicago. It's actually worked really well, and we've been able to get three letters back and forth. My kids wrote two letters in Spanish and received two letters in English, and sent the last letter in English and we should be getting one in Spanish. It's been interesting to see how many things they can connect on- music, tv shows, movies. I was a little nervous that my kids would seem too immature/naive for the American kids, but we haven't had any problems. One observation my students did make was that they were sending really nice letters with nice handwriting (because I kept making them redo them; handwriting is a huge deal in Honduras and we've had many meetings on the subject), and the kids from the US just sent letters with scratched out words, words in print.... haha. I think that was the only negative comment. Other than that, they were VERY excited.

SOOO, today we got to plan a Skype date with the other class! I told my kids to look nice today, so seriously all day long I had students brushing their hair. The boys brought gel to school so they could make their hair look perfect after recess, and all the girls had their fanciest headbands in. (With the uniforms at our school, our hair is about the only thing we can dress up so dress it up they did! :)) I never have my kids at the end of the day, but I switched out a class with one of the Spanish professors so that we could do our Skype date at 2:20-- the last period of the day-- which was probably a good choice because my kids were SO excited. Well, I went to set up my computer and found out at 2 o'clock that it was 3 o'clock in the other class- which meant we totally missed it and the US class wsa on their way out to the bus. WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT!!!! So, I let them play games for the last period haha. Also, I'm not sure, but I think this was the last day of school for our penpals which was super poor planning. I should have remembered I'm in another country where the internet is never reliable, and I should have remembered the time change! So, major bummer but.... the class totally wants to continue with the letters next year, so hopefully that works out!