Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Week 14 Recap & Notes

Well, who's a bad tutor?  How about the one who didn't post for week 13?  :)  I'm sorry about that!  Our family had foster parenting orientation after CC and I totally forgot about it after I got home that night.

Onto what we covered today!

EEL:  We continued covering sentences in the S-Vt-IO-DO pattern, only studying the imperative purpose instead of the declarative purpose.  We learned how to diagram a complex sentence with an adverbial clause (www.asia.wub clause) and reviewed how to diagram a complex sentence with an adjectival clause (who/which, i.e. relative pronoun).

This week the name of the game is practice, practice, practice!  Make sure you are doing your task sheets every day.  The question/confirmation & diagramming are already done for you in the examples at the end of the week's lesson, so there's no reason not to try!

Memorization:
  • Memorize the definitions for independent clauses (you should know this one by now - we've been reciting this since week 1!), subordinate/dependent clauses, clause, phrase, and complex sentence.  These definitions can be found at the beginning of the lesson for week 13 (page 201).
  • Memorize your prepositions (use the song from Foundations if you still need help!) and your conjunctions.  You have to be able to recognize these by sight in sentences!
  • Memorize the questions adjectives and adverbs answer.  This will help you when determining if a clause/phrase is adjectival or adverbial.
Review the difference in diagramming between adjectival clauses and adverbial clauses.

Use Chart M on page 422 to practice identifying independent and subordinate/dependent clauses.  Once the subordinate clause has been identified, label it as adjectival or adverbial.  Try question/confirming & diagramming the sentence - there's no such thing as too much practice!

We touched very briefly on verb mood & voice.  Review this material in the lesson for week 14.  There was also a small section on verb voices and moods in week 2 (page 37-38).  You can also use Chart EE (page 449) for more help on verb moods.  For more info on verb voices, see charts CC & DD (pages 447-448).

IEW:  We started the foundation for our research papers this week.  In class, we worked on Lesson 15 (page 109) in the student book.  We observed the topics of the paragraphs in each source text, then eliminated one topic to narrow down our papers to 3 paragraphs.  From there we moved on to outlining each paragraph of our first topic, then creating a fused outline from the key words we took from those two paragraphs.

I know this got confusing toward the end of class, so I will try to break it down as best I can here on the blog.

For Source 1 ("A Great Empire"), we labeled each paragraph with the following topics:  1 - How Rome Began; 2 - Rome's Greatness; 3 - Roman Society; and 4 - Roman Government.  For Source 2 ("Ancient Rome"), we labeled each paragraph with the following topics:  1 - How Rome Began; 2 - Roman Government; 3 - Roman Society; and 4 - Rome's Greatness.  Remember, we derived the topics of each paragraph based on the topic & clincher sentences of each paragraph.

Since we had to narrow down our 4 topics to 3, we decided Roman Society would be the topic to leave out of our papers.  That left our class with How Rome Began, Rome's Greatness, and Roman Government.  (But if you choose to use Roman Society instead of one of these topics, that's totally OK.  Parents are in charge of this!)  :)

From there, we began working on our first outline for our first topic: How Rome Began.  We made individual keyword outlines (based on the most important & interesting facts, not each sentence!) then created a fused outline of the topic.  To simplify even further, that means we KWO'ed paragraph 1 of Source 1, KWO'ed paragraph 1 of Source 2, then made a fused outline from the two outlines.  This information was recorded on page 112 of the student book.

This process should be repeated for our other two topics.  On page 114, you will outline the topic Rome's Greatness.  KWO paragraph 2 from Source 1, then KWO paragraph 4 from Source 2.  Then created your fused outline at the bottom of page 114.  On page 116, you will outline the topic Roman Government.  KWO paragraph 4 of Source 1, then KWO paragraph 2 of Source 2.  Then create your fused outline at the bottom of page 116.

From there, you will write your three paragraphs based on your three fused outlines.  You may add your dress-ups, decorations, sentence openers, etc. or you can keep it as a rough draft and add your edits next week.  We will continue working on these research papers for the next two weeks.

That's all for this week!  As always, please email me if you have any questions!  See everyone on Tuesday!