Week 1: As Promised ... Pertinent Info.

First things first -- what a great group of kids you all have! I believe class actually went as smoothly today as I had hoped. The kids paid perfect attention, everyone answered questions, and they even called the bingo game "fun."

It seemed as though all of the moms left class with confidence regarding this week's assignments. Although I'd highly recommend reading Lesson One in your EEL Guides, the main EEL assignment for students this week is for them to master as much of the first week's memory work as they can. Use the charts to help you. If you'd like, you can follow up on our simple sentence and intransitive/transitive verb discussions, too.

Below is the memory work:

Week 1:

What five rules must a sentence meet?
A complete sentence must have a subject, a verb, a capital letter, and an end mark, and it must make sense.

What is the subject of a sentence? (C3, W18)
The subject is that part about which something is being said.

What is the predicate of a sentence? (C3, W19)
The predicate of the sentence is that part which says something about the subject.

What are the four sentence structures? (C3, W23)
The four sentence structures are simple,
compound, complex and compound-complex.
What are the four sentence purposes? (C2, W14)
The four sentence purposes are declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamatory.

What are the seven sentence patterns? (C3, W24)
The seven sentence patterns are:
subject/verb intransitive;
subject/verb transitive/direct object;
subject/verb linking/predicate nominative;
subject/verb linking/predicate adjective;
subject/verb trans./indirect object/direct object;
subject/verb trans./do/object complement noun;
subject/verb trans./do/object complement adj.

*Use Essentials of the English Language 112 Classifications, Sentence Classifications, Sentence Components & Structures and Sentence Patterns charts.

With regard to IEW, review vocabulary each day and, when you read through the Lesson One writing assignment together, review our class discussion of using quality adjectives and alliteration to dress up our writing and make it uniquely ours.

A suggested writing schedule is as follows:

Day 1: Read assignment, finish brainstorming quality adjectives and possible alliteration.

Day 2: Rough draft. (Hint: Ask them to read their lines aloud to you, and then you read their lines aloud to them so that they can hear how the words flow and sound together.)

Day 3: Write or type final draft.

Day 4: Illustrate final draft and practice reading aloud.

While we won't have time to read every poem aloud in class, I will let those students whose poems we are able to read choose whether they read or I read for them. Regardless, I believe each student will benefit from reading his or her poem aloud to a home audience!

Last, but certainly not least, don't forget to watch for the separate post detailing our Week 2 Admission Ticket challenge for the Gilded Coupon Campaign.

Essentially yours for the next 23 weeks,

Erin