What's Up, Prepositions?

Introduction

• Write a sentence on the board that is missing a preposition (i.e. The dog sits the table.)
• Ask students what is wrong with the sentence (e.g. it's missing a word; it doesn't make sense).
• Explain that, in this sentence, it is unclear how the dog and the table are related to one another.
• Draw a picture of a dog under a table, and ask the students to use the picture to decide what word should be added to the sentence to make it more clear.
• Invite a student to come up to the board and rewrite the correct sentence (i.e. The dog sits under the table.)
• Underline the word under in the new sentence and explain that this word is a preposition. A preposition is a word that expresses the relationship between a noun and another word. In this case, the preposition tells us the dog's position in relation to the table.