Tuesday, November 27, 2012

It's break time!

Can you believe we've made it twelve weeks?

I remember the first two weeks of Essentials had many of us (myself included!) wanting to breathe into a paper bag.  And now here we are - halfway through the whole year!

I have to give a huge THANK YOU to all you parents who have worked so hard this semester!  First time taking Essentials is not an easy undertaking, and is, at times, overwhelming.  Your hard work and dedication is evident in the progress of your students!

And speaking of the students, can I just say what an absolute joy it is to be the tutor for your students?  You have the most wonderful children, and they make me look forward to coming to CC each week.  I love each and every one of them, even on the crazy days!

We have a long break before our next meeting - 6 weeks, to be exact.  Obviously some of that time will be spent celebrating the holidays and probably just resting from a full semester.  Our return date is January 15th.  Please, please do not neglect your EEL work during this time!  It is of vital importance that your students have a solid working knowledge of what we've covered this semester before moving ahead.  Next semester is tough.  We introduce complex sentences, then compound-complex, and also introduce three new sentence patterns.  While that might not seem like a lot, the degree of difficulty rises considerably.  We will also begin the quid et quo, which is drilling down each word in each sentence until we know every fact about it.  It's a lot of work.  (But they - and you - can do it!

So what to do during the break? 

1.  Continue memorizing your charts.  As we saw in class today with the discussion of "who" as an adjective and/or possessive pronoun, it's so important to have those charts memorized so you can be familiar with your parts of speech.  Practice reciting them orally, write them out, or fill in the blank copies found at the back of your guide (make copies first so you don't use up the only consumable sheets available in your guide - there are no digital copies of the blank charts!).  We have covered Charts A-J thus far.

2.  Practice, practice, practice your task sheet!  I love the idea of letting your students question/confirm & diagram sentences taken from your Christmas letters.  If the thought of making up sentences makes you want to pull your hair out, you could also pull out a verse from the Bible during your Bible study time or other sentences from your student's other school materials.  Or simply go through some of the sentences we've already done this year and change them up.  Swap out nouns & verbs and have your students go through the task sheet for the new sentence.  Work with them to memorize the question/confirmation.  I've previously linked some aides for question/confirmation from Shurley Grammar on the blog (week 5, I think). 

3.  For IEW, there are no assignments to complete over the break.  But if you come across any writing your student has to do for their other school work, you can always review what we've learned in IEW to make that piece of writing better.  Dress ups, decorations, sentence openers, topic & clinchers, etc.

The books I referenced today (for extra help with grammar & diagramming):

Our Mother Tongue:  http://www.amazon.com/Our-Mother-Tongue-Introductory-English/dp/1591280117/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354056357&sr=8-1&keywords=our+mother+tongue

Grammar & Diagramming Sentences:  http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Diagramming-Sentences-Advanced-Straight/dp/093199375X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354056429&sr=1-1&keywords=diagramming+sentences

These are the Amazon links; I am not sure if these are available at local retailers but it would be worth a look if you need something for extra practice.

That said, thank you thank you thank you again for all your hard work!  This has been a wonderful semester, and I am excited about everything we're going to learn together next semester!

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas & New Year's!  Enjoy your break!  :)

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Week 10 Recap & Notes

Here's what we covered today in class:

EEL:  We introduced a new part of speech - the adjective!  We've now covered all the parts of speech listed on Chart A!  We did not spend a whole lot of time on adjectives; please have your students work on memorizing Chart L (on the back of your EEL trivium table or in the guide on page 420).  While we didn't go into great detail on the types of adjectives in class, it's important for your student to memorize them because when we move on to Task 6 (the quid et quo) they will need to know the specifics of each adjective.

After studying adjectives, the next logical move was to predicate adjectives.  Have your students keep working on memorizing linking verbs!  As I mentioned before, they will memorize them in the 2nd half of Foundations this year, but it would be to their benefit to begin memorizing the list of linking verbs now.  They can use Chart K (page 418) to help familiarize themselves with the forms of "to be."

Some of the linking verbs can be tricky, because the word can also double as a transitive verb depending on the pattern of the sentence.  Remember our examples today:

The crawfish smell spicy.  (S-Vl-PA)

I smell crawfish.  (S-Vt-DO)

This is why it is so critical for your students to work through the Question/Confirmation on the task sheet.  If they don't know how to do question/confirmation, they will have difficulty parsing & diagramming their sentences.  This is why it is so important for them to know the question/confirmation process!

For additional help with question/confirmation, you can reference the Analyzing the Task Sheet section at the end of week 3 (beginning on page 49).  There are also some helpful tips on the Shurley grammar site.  I linked those sites in the blog post from Week 5: http://essentialsmrsguy.blogspot.com/2012/10/week-5-recap-notes.html

Weekly Lesson: page 164-171
Weekly Sentences:  page 433
Task Sheet:  page 435

For extra help with adjectives, consult these lessons in Our Mother Tongue:
Adjectives:  Lesson 3, page 24
Subject Modified by an Adjective:  Lesson 13, page 62
Subject Modified by a Possessive Noun: Lesson 14, page 65
Subject Modified by Adjective Phrase: Lesson 16, page 68
Subject Modified by Adjective Clause: Lesson 17, page 71
Predicate with Predicate Adjective: Lesson 24, page 91
Adjectives & Adverbs, Comparative & Superlative: Lesson 48, 172

IEW:  We discussed topic & clincher sentences for our papers as a whole today.  This week we are combining the paragraphs we've written the last 2 weeks - the pyramids, the Sphinx, & the mummies - and combining them into one paper about ancient Egypt.  The assignment is Lesson 8; all that is required of you is to combine your three paragraphs into one paper and write a topic sentence & clincher sentence of the paper.  You can see examples of the topic/clincher on page 45 of the Student Book.

We also introduced another dress up: the who/which clause.  We practiced adding who/which clauses to our sentences to make them more interesting.  Add this dress up to your writing toolbox, and begin including it in your writing.  For more help with who/which clauses (also known as adjectival clauses), you can refer to this week's lesson in EEL or to Lesson 17 in Our Mother Tongue.

Can you believe we only have two weeks of class left?  We will meet next week and then have a break for Thanksgiving, then wrap up with Week 12 on November 27.  Hard to believe this year is almost over!  Be looking for an email from me with the tally sheet for the work your student has completed this semester.  When we return from Thanksgiving break, we will have our auction based on what all your students have completed so far!  They have done excellent work and deserve to be rewarded for their hard work!  (Parents, you do, too!)

Please email me with any questions!  I'll see you next Tuesday!