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
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