Compound Sentences, and Compounds in General

Yesterday was a "three-fer" which ended up covering three lessons. Today will be a two-fer: compounds, and conjunctions. A great habit to establish from the beginning of the year is having students circle (or somehow identify) the basic conjunctions and, or, or but. Students often have trouble with compounds (subject, predicate, object of the preposition, etc.) because they stop too soon with their answer. If they get in the habit of identifying and, or, and but, and know that it means more of the answer is to come, they will do better throughout the year. When it comes to compound sentences, especially if students are asked to identify whether or not a sentence is compound, I use this little trick: I have the students turn their pencil around, use the eraser to cover the conjunction, and then look on both the left and the right. If both sides can stand alone as sentences, the sentence is compound. If that is not the case, then there is probably a compound subject or predicate. Now, is it all that essential that a student know whether or not a sentence is compound? It isn't in that knowing that probably won't result in a mistake in usage, but it is a common grammar question, and as students get older, each year it is expected that their writing becomes more sophisticated and sentence variety is part of that. Additionally, as students begin to work with more elaborate sentence types, it helps if they can identify a compound. One lesson later on deals with compound-complex sentences, so it comes in handy then. Besides the basic coordinating conjunctions, there are also the correlative pairs. Again, students need to know these for their lessons, test questions, etc., especially since it seems the older they get the more test questions tend to be geared to academic terminology rather than simply identifying the answer. Off the subject a bit -- my five foundation skills came in very handy today as we launched into nouns. Nouns should be a review, but they're not. Two hints for students: remember that the articles a, an, and the indicate a noun is coming; and, knowing the five jobs of nouns and pronouns and at least mentally going through our "steps" greatly increased the number of correct answers I was hearing.