Reply #47: Yeah, the sentance structure question is just plain bad. [View All]

[LeftyMom]

LeftyKid just turned seven, and he's really bright for his age. He knows and can properly identify parts of speech (thank you Schoolhouse Rock.) Without prior practice he wouldn't be able to easily to the two step process of filling in the blank so that the sentence makes sense, and then determining the part of speech of the filled-in word. That wouldn't reflect his understanding of parts of speech, because it's a badly designed and needlessly complex way of asking the question.

It would make more sense to say something like

"The dog climbed on the red firetruck.

Is the underlined word a:

a. noun
b. proper noun
c. verb
d. adverb"

that would still be overkill for six year olds, but at least it's a well-designed question that some of them could reasonably be expected to answer.