An understanding of subjects and predicates provides a building block to further explorations of the English language and using proper sentence construction when writing. Basically, the subject is everything that comes before the verb, and the predicate is pretty much the remainder of the sentence. The subject is what or who performs the action, while the predicate explains what the subject does
. or offers information about the subject. When an educator begins to try to teach this concept to students, usually beginning in about the third grade, he should do so very slowly and carefully to ensure that students grasp it as fully as they can before moving on to other sentence components and constructions. By grade five, students should have in place a working knowledge of subjects, predicates and other sentence components. A teacher should look for very simple worksheets for the opening lessons. Such a worksheet would contain sentences such as: The dog ate his dinner. In this sentence, the students should eventually be able to identify the subject as "the dog" and the predicate as "ate his dinner". If asked to identify only simple subjects and predicates, the answers would be somewhat different. The simple subject in the sample sentence is "dog", and the simple predicate is "ate". After conquering this concept, students could move on to longer, more complicated sentences in which subjects and predicates are not quite so obvious. In time, students will be introduced to compound subjects and predicates and will have to expand their minds and knowledge to encompass this additional concept. Here is an example of what more advanced students might encounter: Connie and Mary went shopping for cosmetics and bubble bath after they ate their cinnamon rolls. In this sentence, students would come to find out that "Connie and Mary" is the compound subject, while "went shopping" is the predicate. For more examples and resources, one has many online options. More reference links: http://www.towson.edu/ows/exercisesubjpred.htm http://www.say-it-in-english.com/BasicEnglish3.html
