Swimming

I have swam my entire life. I swam when I was little, I swam in high school, I swam in college. I had to work very hard in order to perform well. Swimming did not come naturally to me. I had to put in a lot of extra work. 
During high school, we would go to Eisenhower Park Aquatic Center for practice. Our high school did not have our own pool. We would travel there by bus, and we would have to be on the deck ready to swim our first set by 3:05pm.
It was always a process to get ready to swim, especially if we were to do a set with flippers. I would have to put on my bathing suit, put on my cap, put on my goggles, and put on my flippers. I would have to go to my lane. I would walk across the bulkhead to lane two. I was always behind Danielle in the lane line-up. She would dive in, I get on the block, I would wait 10 seconds and then dive in myself.  Under the water was my favorite place. The water was deep, so once you dove in, you could swim along the bottom of the pool floor, looking at the green and white tiles as you streamlined back up to the top of the water. 
Sometimes it felt as if we swam until we had no breath left in our lungs. Besides feeling tired, waterlogged, and cranky at the end of practices- I would give anything to swim one more time. 

Vocabulary Defined

Flippers-A flat rubber shoe like object worn on the foot for underwater swimming.

Bulkhead- Floating divider separating sections of the pool.

Block- A raised platform used in the sport of swimming, a swimmer dives from this into the water at the start of the race. 

Streamlined- A way of positioning the body once diving into the water in order to make underwater swimming more efficient. 

Waterlogged- Feeling exhausted and a heavy like feeling after being in water for a long time.

Cranky- Upset, irritable

Vocabulary Exercises

1. Draw a picture of a bulkhead.

2. Which word above would fit the sentence below the best: My feet were blistered from my              

                                                   .

3. Create a sentence using the word cranky.

                                                                                                                                                             .

Grammar Point Defined

Prepositions are a closed class. They cannot stand alone, they are words that help often figure out when, why and where. Prepositions are used in prepositional phrases. They start with a preposition, end with a noun that is called the object of the prepositional phrase. For example, the phrase "under the table," is a prepositional phrase. Table, is the object, under is the preposition.

Grammar Point Exercises

1. Create your own prepositional phrase! 

2. Determine three prepositional phrases used in the excerpt above.  

3. In the following phrase circle the object, and underline the preposition.

She saw the corn across the pumpkin patch.

prepositional phrase begins with a preposition and ends in a

noun,

which is called the

object

of the preposition

. A

prepositional phrase begins with a preposition and ends in a

noun,

which is called the

object

of the preposition

.