It's break time!

Can you believe we've made it twelve weeks?

I remember the first two weeks of Essentials had many of us (myself included!) wanting to breathe into a paper bag.  And now here we are - halfway through the whole year!

I have to give a huge THANK YOU to all you parents who have worked so hard this semester!  First time taking Essentials is not an easy undertaking, and is, at times, overwhelming.  Your hard work and dedication is evident in the progress of your students!

And speaking of the students, can I just say what an absolute joy it is to be the tutor for your students?  You have the most wonderful children, and they make me look forward to coming to CC each week.  I love each and every one of them, even on the crazy days!

We have a long break before our next meeting - 6 weeks, to be exact.  Obviously some of that time will be spent celebrating the holidays and probably just resting from a full semester.  Our return date is January 15th.  Please, please do not neglect your EEL work during this time!  It is of vital importance that your students have a solid working knowledge of what we've covered this semester before moving ahead.  Next semester is tough.  We introduce complex sentences, then compound-complex, and also introduce three new sentence patterns.  While that might not seem like a lot, the degree of difficulty rises considerably.  We will also begin the quid et quo, which is drilling down each word in each sentence until we know every fact about it.  It's a lot of work.  (But they - and you - can do it!

So what to do during the break? 

1.  Continue memorizing your charts.  As we saw in class today with the discussion of "who" as an adjective and/or possessive pronoun, it's so important to have those charts memorized so you can be familiar with your parts of speech.  Practice reciting them orally, write them out, or fill in the blank copies found at the back of your guide (make copies first so you don't use up the only consumable sheets available in your guide - there are no digital copies of the blank charts!).  We have covered Charts A-J thus far.

2.  Practice, practice, practice your task sheet!  I love the idea of letting your students question/confirm & diagram sentences taken from your Christmas letters.  If the thought of making up sentences makes you want to pull your hair out, you could also pull out a verse from the Bible during your Bible study time or other sentences from your student's other school materials.  Or simply go through some of the sentences we've already done this year and change them up.  Swap out nouns & verbs and have your students go through the task sheet for the new sentence.  Work with them to memorize the question/confirmation.  I've previously linked some aides for question/confirmation from Shurley Grammar on the blog (week 5, I think). 

3.  For IEW, there are no assignments to complete over the break.  But if you come across any writing your student has to do for their other school work, you can always review what we've learned in IEW to make that piece of writing better.  Dress ups, decorations, sentence openers, topic & clinchers, etc.

The books I referenced today (for extra help with grammar & diagramming):

Our Mother Tongue:  http://www.amazon.com/Our-Mother-Tongue-Introductory-English/dp/1591280117/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1354056357&sr=8-1&keywords=our+mother+tongue

Grammar & Diagramming Sentences:  http://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Diagramming-Sentences-Advanced-Straight/dp/093199375X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1354056429&sr=1-1&keywords=diagramming+sentences

These are the Amazon links; I am not sure if these are available at local retailers but it would be worth a look if you need something for extra practice.

That said, thank you thank you thank you again for all your hard work!  This has been a wonderful semester, and I am excited about everything we're going to learn together next semester!

I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas & New Year's!  Enjoy your break!  :)