Week 20

EEL

Today we looked more in depth at adjectives.  If your student has not yet memorized the definition of an adjective or the questions that adjectives answer, please take a look at chart L and make it a priority to memorize the gray portion.

But today we jumped to the bottom of the chart and tackled types of multi-word adjectives, the adjectival phrase and the adjectival clause.  We looked at many samples of sentences with adverbial and adjectival prepositional phrases and labeled them accordingly.

Adjectival and Adverbial Prepositional Phrases

Identifying adjectival and adverbial prepositional phrases is difficult!  Students rose to the challenge, though I got a lot of blank stares too.  The key to this skill is to figure out the word modified and identify which question the prep. phrase answers.

The bridge over the water is lovely.

Over the water is the prep. phrase.  It modifies bridge.  It answers the question Which? bridge--the one over the water.  It's an adjective prepositional phrase.  One thing that may trip up students is that prepositional phrases tell where so often.  Your student may look at the sentence and say that over the water describes Where the bridge is.  Remember that if your phrase modifies a noun, you have an adjective.  If it modifies a verb or adverb, it is used as an adverb.

Bonus

Found the answer to the sentence that tripped us up.  Thank you, Erin Richardson and Rhonda Lin for hunting down the answer even before class was over!  I love smart phones.

There are three monkeys in that tree.

The word there is an expletive.  Nope, doesn't mean a curse word. Who knew?! It just means that it acts kind of like an interjection in a sentence.  It is there to support a style of expression, not to give more meaning.  For instance, you could leave out the word entirely if you switched the word order around.  Three monkeys are in that tree.  Same meaning, different style of expression.  In the original sentence, there would be diagrammed on a floating line above the subject noun, just like an interjection.

Adjective Modifiers

This exercise was taken straight from lesson 20 in the EEL guide.  We matched sample sentences with the correct adjective modifier type.  We identified noun modifiers used as adjectives, adjective clauses, single word adjectives, prepositional phrase adjectives, and even appositives.  This exercise helped identify many different ways that an adjective can appear in a sentence.

IEW

We covered our last four vocabulary words for the year--revel, jaunty, encounter, lure.

We took a look at lesson 29 and talked about the anecdotal opener.  Consider adding one of these to your paper.  Especially if you are ahead in the writing, you will have time to hunt down a good story about your character and stuff it full of five sense descriptions.

Some specifics.
The anecdotal opener is a paragraph all to itself that goes before your introduction.
You can italicize it.
It is no more than 8 sentences long.
It tells an interesting or amusing story.
Its purpose is to hook your reader.
You can repeat and reflect both the anecdotal opener and your introductory statement in the final clincher.

Look on page 203 in U.S. History-Based Writing Lessons to see an outline for the introduction and conclusion of this paper.  To see the outline for the entire paper, check you student guide and look at Chart VIII (Library Research Report).  The only real difference is that page 203 includes the anecdotal opener.

IEW Assignment for this week:

Finish your third fused outline and write all body paragraphs.  Be sure to use the checklists that I passed out last week to check that you have completed all the requirements for each body paragraph.  Next week we will move on to writing the introduction and conclusion.