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!