I plan to do lots of these little instructional videos. I just taught a grammar class last week on auxiliary (helping) verbs and thought that a video with my tricks for memorizing them might be easy to do.

Generally, I’m not a big fan of memorization, especially when it comes to grammar. Grammar is all about analyzing words and word groups–figuring out what they are doing in a sentence. Memorizing prepositions, for example, tends to confuse kids because many prepositions are occasionally used as adverbs. If you can figure out what function a word is serving, you are okay, but if you are just relying on a memorized list, you’re likely to miss it.

But the helping verbs are easy to remember (see video), and spotting them just helps kids to not overlook them when identifying verb phrases. Anyway, I hope you like the video. It was actually kind of fun to make.

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