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!