I have to tell you. These kids blow me away. Their eagerness and excitement over the Samaritan's Purse gift, not to mention the desire of several to contribute above and beyond the suggested amount of their own money, really grabs my heart. God loves a cheerful giver, and we have an entire classroom full of happy philanthropists! Bless all of you moms for sharing your sweet children with me!
In my mind, their enthusiasm overshadows the work we actually did in class yesterday, but we still accomplished a bit in both EEL and IEW.
EEL consisted mostly of review. We formally introduced Task 5 on the EEL Student Task Sheets, which will serve as an excellent review tool at home the next two weeks. During this time, revisit the whole semester's material in a fun and relaxed fashion. Question and probe your students, looking for strengths and weaknesses or incomplete understanding. Now is the time to ensure a firm foundation in what we've learned. Over these two weeks, mix and match the first four sentence patterns and four sentence purposes to form simple and compound sentences. Using Task 5, modify them, dress them up, and diagram the dress-ups to the extent you can. Remember: We haven't yet covered complex or compound-complex sentences. You may want to skip those two elements of Task 5 modification for now. However, the rest should come pretty easily for the students.
We'll spend most of our time next week playing a review game the kids and I brainstormed for during our "secret" meeting yesterday! :) For the game, please ask the kids to bring a dry erase marker from home if they're frustrated with our class markers. I'll purchase new markers in January.
IEW again asks the students to write creatively this week. I haven't read their papers yet, but from what I heard yesterday, the students are doing a fantastic job. Like last week's assignment, Lesson 12 features three source text sections from which students will outline their entire story sequence. We completed two section outlines in class, which leaves only one for home before brainstorming and rough drafts.
The new decoration is 3SSS, which stands for "three short staccato sentences." Essentially, this is three VSS's strung together for effect. The kids grasped the concept quickly in class. I anticipate they'll incorporate it into their papers with ease. Notice on the checklists, however, that only one decoration is required per section. While they can include as many as they wish, only one of the three options (dialogue, alliteration or 3SSS) is required per section.
Next week should be fun. We'll probably flip-flop our time, completing IEW first and saving our EEL review game time for after. Then we'll leave the last 30 minutes or so open for Samaritan's Purse and the cookie exchange. Whew! It'll be a full two hours!
I'll probably touch base again concerning Samaritan's Purse. I sent home the gift catalogs with the kids and asked them to bring their tickets and money to class next week along with the knowledge of what they'd like to purchase. For those who contribute their own money, remind them to add in the sponsors' match. For example, a student who's earned $5 in tickets and contributes $5 will actually be able to spend $20.
An important note: I DO have Week 10's papers still, as I only got through half of them. And, of course, I have Week 11's that were turned in yesterday. So most of the kids have an additional three tickets coming to them. A couple who turned in papers late and haven't yet received them back may have four. They can factor that into their counting. I'll try to send out an update of what I have here at home so everyone knows exactly what to expect.
Please email me as you have questions. And will someone shoot me an email on this yummy cookie exchange idea? I think y'all hammered out details while the kids and I were outside yesterday.
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