Week 9 Admission Ticket

Tighten the following sentences and turn them into Mrs. Erin next week:

There were several children playing games in the park.

The funny story that I told you yesterday about the cat that I saw at the pet store made my sister laugh.

The kids were being carefully watched by attentive parents.

The tiny oak sapling was being chopped down by children with hatchets.

Week 8: For fun at home, add prepositional phrases to your sentences!

What a crazy but great day today! The poor Westside pastor -- our kids' eagerness (read: shrill screams and cheers for their teammates) during math relays disturbed his writing time! We'll be quieter next week...heehee.

During EEL time, we officially introduced prepositional phrases. Incorporate them into your writing, labeling and diagramming this week with these points in mind:

1. A word such as "down" may be an adverb or a preposition. For it to be used as a preposition in a sentence, it must have an object. In "The cat slid down, " 'down' is an adverb. In "The cat slid down the rail," 'down' is a preposition and 'rail' is its object.


2. Help the kids learn to recognize whether a prepositional phrase is adjectival (modifying a noun) or adverbial (modifying a verb).


3. One thing I failed to mention in class is what's called "phrasal prepositions." Check your EEL Guide on page 101, but these are simply prepositions that appear as two or more words, such as "according to" or "with regard to."

Keep working through Tasks 1-4 on your Student EEL Task Sheets. Use your sample sentences at the end of Lesson 8, or encourage the kids to write their own S-Vi and S-Vt-DO sentences. Start simple, then dress them up with adverbs and prepositional phrases.

Also in class, we practiced changing declarative sentences to interrogative, exclamatory and imperative purposes. This actually gave the kids an unknown preview of the first part of Task 5, and you can do this at home, too, if you'd like.

I'm not sure whether IEW assignments will require more or less time this week. It probably depends on each individual's strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes. For some, rough drafts are painful; for others, words pour onto the paper. When it comes to revision, the reverse may be true.

I liken this week's assignment to wrapping a gift. Students have spent the past two weeks choosing and packaging the contents. This week, their revisions, corrections and dress-ups will ensure the contents are complete. Adding their introductory statements, clinchers and titles will be like wrapping the package and tying its strings neatly into a bow, making the gift ready to present. They'll have crafted a "total package" paper on the wonders of the ancient world. I can't wait to read them! I know they'll be super, and I plan to allow extra reading time in class next week to reward their hard work.

Last but not least, these kids bless me week after week. I treasure our time together. Thank you for the minutes and hours you spend at home laboring to raise young men and women of character, strength, work ethic, and faith. I pray each and every one of them rises up in the years to come to call you blessed!

Week 8 Admission Ticket

As my brain has attended to other jobs the past two weeks, I've neglected my Gilded Coupon Campaign! Poor students! For Week 8, freebie coupons will be distributed!

Week 7: Boldly compose and diagram your prose!

In class Tuesday, we boldly added the awesome adverb to our mix of EEL rhetoric. We also dressed up (with adverbs), classified, and diagrammed compound S-Vi and S-Vt-DO sentences. I have to say, these kids grab my heart! They are eager and willing and excited and so smart. I just love spending two hours with them each week. Time flies by, and before I blink, it's 3:00 p.m.! Thank you for the privilege of teaching them!

When adverbs answer how, when, where, why, etc., in a sentence, they may exist as a single word, or they may appear in the form of a phrase or clause acting as an adverb. We focused on one-word adverbs, which often end in -ly, and phrasal adverbs.

An example of a phrasal adverb follows:

The cat dozed lazily in the sunny window.

"In the sunny window" is a prepositional phrase that answers the question, "Where did the cat sleep?"

I wish I could demonstrate the diagram! Basically, you diagram adverbs beneath the word they modify, be it a verb, an adjective or another adverb. Modifiers always belong on a diagonal line, and nouns and verbs on a horizontal line. Refer to your EEL guide or "Our Mother Tongue" for help.

At home these next two weeks, begin simply with basic S-Vi and S-Vt-DO sentences. Make them compound with coordinating conjunctions. Experiment with changing their purpose from declarative to exclamatory to imperative. Add some adverbs. Then classify and diagram using the Q&A on your "Simple Steps for Solving Sentences" chart.

Turning to IEW, rather than having students read rough drafts aloud in class Tuesday, I read to them from an engaging article on the Indian monsoon. The writer engaged his audience through many of the writing techniques we're learning in class -- strong verbs, quality adjectives, varied sentence structures, etc. I believe listening to excellent excerpts will inspire their own writing, so we'll do that from time to time.

Our IEW lesson introduced prepositional phrase openers, and students need to incorporate at least one into each of their rough draft paragraphs. They are writing two rough drafts, one on the sphinx and another on mummies. They may turn these in if they wish, but it's not required. In Lesson 8, we will add these to last week's rough draft and spend all week revising, dressing up and adding an introduction and clincher.

Finally, thank you for waiting patiently for this post! Tuesday evening consisted of shuttling Maggie around, and I worked full days at furniture market Wednesday and Thursday. Life runs ahead of me during weeks such as this!

See you in 2 weeks for Week 8!

And the winners are...

I awarded two bonus tickets in class today.

Mollie Gaines titled her ziggurat paragraph "Ziggurats: The Zenith of Ancient Architecture." For the hard work I'm sure she invested in discovering the alliterative adjective 'zenith,' Mollie won the Most Creative Title ticket.

In recognition of his sentence that incorporated 20 (yes, 20!) IEW vocabulary words, Lee Dees earned himself a bonus ticket, too. Here's his sentence with vocab words in bold:

The radiantly streaked tiger quaked indefinitely at the colosally corrupted monument that resembled a defiantly ruthless, burly, and sinister hunter, who went through the jungle devastating the petrified animals, hoping to be prestigious and adorn and fashion his towering walls with animals, making conversationists irate and feel enmity.

Way to go, guys!! You rock!

Week 7 Admission Ticket

Bring me a Student EEL Task Sheet with Tasks 1-4 completed for the following sentence:

The kitten slurped the cream, but the puppy spilled it!

Week 6: We can diagram direct objects!

Wow! What a lot of material we covered in class today! My head is still spinning as I wonder, "Did I forget anything?"

To hopefully make your week at home navigable, here are the directions in which you need to steer:

1. Memorize FANBOYS and practice determining whether your coordinating conjunctions are joining words, phrases or clauses. In class we only discussed independent clauses; I purposefully ignored subordinate clauses because we will circle back around and add these to the mix in a few weeks.
2. Using two sentence purposes (decl. and excl.) and two sentence structures (simple and compound), juxtapose S-Vi sentences and S-Vt-Do sentences until students become confident differentiating between the two. If you have trouble coming up with sentences on your own, pull from the sample sentences at the end of the weekly lessons or the models on the 112 simple and compound sentences charts. You can also borrow from the diagramming book if you purchased it. Remind students to utilize their Simple Steps for Solving Sentences until the questions are intuitive and they no longer need the chart.
3. Practice classifying and diagramming each kind of sentence on the EEL Task Sheet.

The kids have three weeks to become comfortable with S-Vt-DOs before we introduce linking verbs, so don't feel like mastery needs to come in the next four days. Take a deep breath, smile, and accomplish what you can!

Transitioning to IEW, the kids' paragraphs are astounding! I hope that, even after only six weeks, you're pleased at home with the writing skills beginning to develop! This is a dynamic group.

I mentioned in class, but I'll repeat here, the kids need to turn in a rough draft only next week. (Well, they need to turn in the checklist, too. But I say "rough draft only" because they don't need to invest a lot of time in revision.) Follow the directions in the assignment, and you'll be fine.

From the source text, let them choose the facts that are most interesting or important to them. This may or may not be what's interesting and important to you. It's OK! As long as they choose five to seven facts and write five to seven complete sentences with a clear topic and clincher, save your energy for suggestions revisions regarding the final report.

I hope to leave for the beach tomorrow and return Monday (key word: hope). Should you need me, use email or my cell.

Hard to believe, but it's six weeks down, 18 to go! We're one quarter of the way through!

Week 6 Admission Ticket

To presently earn the next admission ticket in our radiant Gilded Coupon Campaign, students must fashion an original sentence using at least five fanciful IEW vocabulary words. The student who adorns his or her complete sentence profusely with the most validated vocabulary words will emerge as the prestigious victor of an an extra monumental ticket!

Fortuitously, students need not quake, bellow, or despair at this awesome assignment. To aid them in accomplishing this colossal feat, they may use any tantalizing word from Lessons 1-19. And although their ruthless and sinister EEL instructor does not wish to corrupt their young minds, she will accept explicit run-on sentences without wail or falter. Also, in order to deplete the vocab list, students may deftly use a word in a form that resembles the original. For example, "petrified" may be employed as "petrify," or "defy" may be written as "defiant" or "defiantly."