Week 8 Recap & Notes

Here's what we covered in class this week:

EEL:  We worked on the "Week 8" lesson in the EEL guide, and introduced a new part of speech: the preposition.  Any Essentials student who is also taking Foundations has the benefit of memorizing the list of prepositions this year.  There is an excellent song on the Foundations memory work audio CD (also available for download on CC Connected) that lists all the prepositions on the chart.  So have your students work on memorizing the Prepositions chart (go ahead and memorize all the prepositions - the Foundations tutors, myself included, will just have to deal with it!).  Remind your students that prepositions are labeled Pr and the object of the preposition is labeled OP.  We also covered the two types of prepositional phrases - adverbial and adjectival.  Adverbial phrases modify verbs, adverbs, & adjectives.  Adjectival phrases modify nouns & pronouns.  A list of questions to test what your prepositional phrase is modifying can be found in this week's lesson in the guide.  If time allows, have your students practice adding prepositional phrases to S-Vi declarative sentences and identify if the phrases are adverbial or adjectival.

This week we are working on interrogative, compound, S-Vt-DO sentences.  This week will wrap up our coverage of the pattern S-Vt-DO.  Remind your students the three ways to make a declarative/exclamatory sentence into an interrogative sentence: 1, change the end mark; 2, use an interrogative pronoun; and 3, add a helping verb.  For extra practice, your students can look over the sample sentences on Chart G and practice turning them into interrogative sentences.

As always, weekly sentences are found on page 433 and the editing exercise is at the end of the lesson.

IEW:  We get a bit of a break this week after the massive assignment from last week.  Today we introduced making KWOs from large blocks of text and summarizing references.  Remember, our goal is to outline facts, not just words.  Have your students practice selecting the most important and/or interesting facts in their source text(s) and make a KWO from that.  Keep your outlines between 5-7 points - no more than 7.  You may use the outline we made in class or you can have your student come up with a new outline.

Review a topic & clincher sentence with them, using the paragraph modeled on page 33 of the Student Book.  Show how key words in the topic & clincher sentence connect to form a cohesive paragraph.

We did not introduce any new dress ups or decorations this week, but please do not skimp on these in your writing!  Make your outline, brainstorm, and check your rough and final drafts against the checklist at the end of Lesson 6.

To find info on this in your materials, we are doing Unit IV/Summarizing References in our TWSS binders, Page 8 of the Student Resource Notebook (top outline only), and Lesson 6/page 33 in the Ancient History-Based Student Book.


Please email me if you have any questions!  See everyone next Tuesday!  Come prepared to read your papers!