Class Tuesday the 28th has been cancelled

Hi all, CC will be cancelled this Tuesday due to the impending storm. When we return we will continue with week 3's information. We will make up the day at the end of this semester. I will be praying for all the families and please be safe. I will see everyone next Tuesday. Thanks!

Class on Tuesday has been cancelled

Hi all, CC will be cancelled this Tuesday due to the impending storm. When we return we will continue with week 3's information. We will make up the day at the end of this semester. I will be praying for all the families and please be safe. I will see everyone next Tuesday. Thanks!

Week 2 Recap

Hi Parents!

Give yourselves a big, double-handed pat on the back, because you've completed the overview weeks of EEL!

We've covered Charts A, B, C, & D so far, so please keep review these with your students.  Copy them, recite them, play games with them.  One game that students seem to love is beating their parents at a task, so challenge them in copying a chart (like I did in class) and see if they can beat you at copying it out.  As Ruth mentioned, please do not neglect Chart A.  It is critical that your students become familiar with Chart A!

You can also have your students work on the editing exercises found on page 41 in the EEL guide.  If you need help with reinforcing punctuation, capitalization, & spelling rules, you can find some helpful resources in the Excursion part of your EEL guide on pages 455-466.

This upcoming week we will start drilling down on our first sentence classification, simple/declarative/S-Vi.  We will also introduce the Analytical Task Sheet, which we will be working with for the remainder of the year.

For IEW, practice making keyword outlines with your students.  As I mentioned in class, any block of text or paragraph can be used for making keyword outlines.  If your student is having trouble making his or her outlines, try finding a passage of text that is at or below their reading level so it is easier to read.  We want to hone their writing skills during this time, rather than multitask by trying to improve their reading skills at the same time.  Follow our class guidelines outlined in the TWSS book on pages 7-14.

This upcoming week we will continue working on making keyword outlines and hone our skills retelling passages based on our key words.  We will also cover different kinds of sentence openers.

If you would like to try challenging your students at home with timed math sheets, you can find the sheets we used in class at www.mathfactcafe.com.   I used sheets based on the 3rd grade level because I figured that would be a good level for our class.  You can also find some timed math games at www.mathisfun.com.  This is a great way to provide your students a way to measure their progress throughout the year.

Again, congratulations on surviving the overview weeks!  And please remember that Essentials is designed in a way that your students go through the program three times.  So if your students don't "get" every single piece of information this year, that's OK!  I am responsible for covering everything in class, but you ultimately decide what they do at home!  You want to challenge your students, but not overwhelm them to the point where they are miserable.  Scale the material to their needs, or use your guide and materials to add to it if they need more of a challenge.

Thank you for all your hard work and dedication, and I'll see everyone on Tuesday!

Week 1 Update and Notes

Hi Parents!

I owe you all a big THANK YOU for all the grace you extended to me today during class!  Thank you for your patience with me while we settle into this new course!

We have all the English flashcards cut out and bagged up for those of you who did not get to pick up your cards today.  These will be a great way to review important EEL terms we will cover over the year.

Some follow up for EEL:

• Practice those charts!  The students need to work diligently on having charts A & B memorized.  Some of the parts of Chart A I didn't get to cover very well are the 8 Parts of Speech and the 5 Parts of a Sentence.  Review these with your students, as well as the parts we covered in detail in class (the structure, purpose, & patterns).  Quiz them orally and make them copy the charts by hand.  Work on these charts at least once a day.  A lot of it is not going to make sense to them, but they need to know it.  It will all start making sense once we start breaking down the big puzzle.
• For Chart B, sit down and go over it with your students.  Discuss each purpose and pattern (the structure is the same for all - Simple).
• Each week there are editing exercises at the end of each lesson.  You will find week 1's editing exercise on page 31 in the EEL guide.  Follow the instructions on the page and see how many mistakes your student can catch in the passage.
• Don't stress!  So, we hit a lot of topics today, right?  It's a lot to take in.  We'll do another bird's-eye-view of the course next week, then we'll start drilling down.  Don't worry - at the end of the year, your student is going to know every inch of Chart A (including what each little word/letter combo/line mean!).
• When your students are copying their charts, please make sure they are copying the lines exactly like they are shown on the chart.  The vertical line between the subject & predicate must extend below the line underneath the sentence structure.  Any line that is diagonal must go in the direction as shown on the chart.  This will not make sense to them now, and that's OK.  It will make perfect sense once we get into diagramming around week 7.  So when you check for accuracy, don't just check letters - check lines, too.
• Reminder: the scope and sequence of EEL can be found on page 18 of the EEL guide.
• The Week-at-a-Glance suggested home schedule can be found on page 22 of the EEL guide.

Some follow up for IEW:

• The assignment for this week is the two poems in Lessons 1 & 2 in the Ancient History-Based Writing Lessons Student Book.  Have your students do the brainstorming for quality adjectives on page 9 and strong verbs on page 13.  After they have brainstormed, get them to complete the poem using words they have chosen from their brainstorming pages.  Don't forget to remind them of alliteration and -LY words!  If they would like to illustrate their poems after writing them, that is always encouraged!
• Bring 2 copies of the poem(s) next week for class - one for you to keep and follow along with the student and one to turn in for their writing book.
• The instructions for the stylistic techniques can be found in your TWSS book on pages 17-18.
• Don't forget to download the student resource notebook from the IEW website!  Follow the instructions on the blue sheet in the front of your Ancient History-Based Writing Lessons Student Book.
• Vocabulary cards are in the back of the student book!

Coming next week:

• We will continue our overview of EEL as a whole
• We will focus in on verbs
• We will learn how to make Key Word Outlines in IEW

Please keep track of what work your student completes for Essentials this week!  Next week I will have the ticket tally sheets, and we will go over what your student has completed and award tickets as needed.

A few housekeeping notes: next week when class is over, I would greatly appreciate it if you (and/or the students) can help me get the room back in order the way Lakeside keeps it.  This includes collapsing and stacking the chairs and moving the tables back to their correct rooms/places.

I cannot even tell you what a wonderful job all your students (and you!) did today!  We have such a fun class, and I am so excited about this year!

As usual, if you have any questions, please email me!  Thank you all for your participation and excitement today!

Labeling Your Trivium Tables

Hi parents!

If you purchased the two trivium tables for Essentials, you might have noticed that the tables aren't labeled the same as the charts in the guide.  I recommend using the tables in class, as they are easy to write on & erase (with dry-erase markers) and portable.  Please get a Sharpie or permanent marker and label your charts as follows for ease of use in class:

English Grammar Trivium Table
Sentence Classifications - Chart A
Nouns - Chart E
Pronouns - Chart F
Verbs - Chart C
Principal Parts of Verbs - Chart D
Adverbs - Chart I
Adjectives - Chart L
Conjunctions - Chart H
Interjections - Chart J
Prepositions - Chart J

Quid Et Quo
Sentence Classifications Examples - Chart B
Verb Anatomy - Chart K


Thanks!
Tara

Welcome to Essentials!

Hello Essentials parents!

I'm Tara Guy, your child's Essentials tutor for the upcoming 2012-2013 school year.  A little bit of my background: I am married to Boyd Guy, who is the art director at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, where he is also completing his masters and preparing to start his doctoral work next year.  We have one daughter, Sara Claire, who is 6.  Sara Claire is entering her second year of Foundations, and she is involved in dance, art, & science lab classes.  We are members of Edgewater, where my husband teaches the adult men's Sunday school class and I co-teach the 4 & 5 year old Mission Friends class.  We volunteer as a family each month at a nursing home/assisted living facility in our neighborhood with our life group through Edgewater.  We are huge Saints fans and try to make at least one game each year.

I am so excited about this upcoming year!  I think we are going to have a blast delving into the English language together.  With the exception of one student, we're all newcomers to Essentials (myself included!).

Leigh Bortins wrote in her intro to the EEL guide that each student should (ideally) take three "tours" of Essentials.  Just about everyone here is on their first tour of Essentials.  What does this mean for you as a parent?  It means that your goal this year should be the mastery of the grammar and definitions of Essentials.  Leigh set up the Essentials curriculum based on the classical method of learning.  So the focus this year is to fill their minds with the backbone of the English language (the grammar of English grammar, if you will).  Does this mean that if your child memorizes the charts quickly that they shouldn't move on to something harder?  Absolutely not.  You are your child's teacher, you know their strengths and weaknesses, and only you can decide what to teach and what not to teach in your home.  We will cover everything in class; it's up to you to decide where your child is and what their focus should be.  The beauty of the Essentials program is that it is easily tiered to different abilities, so that students can be studying the exact same material but working on it at different levels.

Please make sure you read through the day's lesson in your EEL guide before coming to class.  Familiarize yourself with terms and charts so you will be prepared for what we'll be studying.

Our afternoon will break down as follows:

• 45 minutes of EEL (English)
• 30 minutes of math games & review
• 45 minutes of IEW (writing)

Parents, please make sure your students are in class promptly at 1:00 pm, because we will begin right away.  Since this is the first time through Essentials for almost every student, we have a lot of ground to cover in each class.  I am not 100% positive, but I think this year the lunch and recess times have been swapped, so students will need to be collected from outside and need to get a drink of water/take their bathroom breaks with enough time to be present in class for 1:00.  Our classroom is room 107.

I also encourage you to bring a notebook and pen for your own note-taking.  The EEL guide is excellent and a wonderful stand-alone resource for English grammar, but you may see something demonstrated in class or hear a suggestion from another parent you'd like to implement at home.

Some tips to help you with Essentials this year:

• If your student has trouble memorizing the parts of charts & definitions of English grammar, sign up for the Foundations side of CC Connected and download the audio files for the English grammar memory work from each cycle.  There are even some musically-gifted CC moms who have put some parts of the English grammar memory work to music!  These are great to listen to in the car or while your children are coloring or playing.  It will help reinforce the definitions of critical terms.  When you log-in, do a search for English grammar for all cycles and narrow your search results by .mp3.
• I strongly encourage signing up for the Essentials side of CC Connected.  There you will find many resources to aide your teaching of Essentials.  If you are interested in this, let me know and I'll check with Simone on what you need to do to get signed up.
• Consider practicing math facts with your children using flashcards and help them brush up on their mental math.  During our Essentials training, there was a big difference between the students who practiced their math with flashcards and those who did not.
• IEW Webinars - this is a great site that can offer more clarity on IEW units.
• IEW Yahoo! Group - an online network of families studying IEW.

As I come across more tips & tricks, I will be sure to post them here.  I will also post after class each Tuesday what we covered that day and what the upcoming assignments are.

As always, please let me know if you have any questions!  The best way to reach me is via email, which is tara (dot) guy (at) gmail (dot) com.  (I wrote it that way because blogger is notorious for spammers!)

I'll close by paraphrasing something Leigh said in the intro to the EEL guide (if you have time, go ahead and read "The Expedition" in the front of your EEL guide - it does a great job of communicating the scope and vision of the Essentials program!).  We are all disciples of the "Word made flesh."  God places a high priority and emphasis on language.  It is one of the many names of our Savior Jesus Christ (John 1:1).  God uses the written word of the Bible to communicate to His people.  It is critical that we have an understanding of language because it is a critical method of communication from our God.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I look forward to seeing you all on Tuesday!  It's going to be a GREAT year!

In Christ,

Tara