Week 5: Can you diagram?

Week 5's EEL lesson focuses on interrogative sentences. At home this week, practice classifying and diagramming simple interrogative S-Vi sentences such as, "Who wept?," "Who is weeping?," or "Did Jesus weep?" As you Q&A with your child, demonstrate where you can how to recast the question as a declarative sentence. Interrogatives often employ helping verbs, and recasting as a declarative helps to place all of the verbs next to one another. The third sentence serves as an example: "Jesus did weep."

During class yesterday, we spent a good bit of time differentiating between phrases and clauses. Reinforce this at home, but know that IEW will introduce prepositional phrase openers in Lesson 7 and who/which clauses in Lesson 8. Students will get plenty of practice with phrases and clauses in the coming weeks!

Looking ahead, Week 6 of EEL takes things up a notch. The lesson introduces students to conjunctions (four types) and compound sentences, which go hand in hand, and the material also begins integrating S-Vt-DO sentences into our classification system.

SO... when you work at home over the next few days, look for evidence of mastery with some basics:

1. Students should know the difference between declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamatory sentences.
2. Students should confidently identify S-Vi sentences.
3. Students should be able to Q&A with you to identify the subject and verb of a sentence.
4. Students should know the four types of verbs and the basic idea that verbs tell time (tense -- past, present, future).
5. Students should know that imperative sentences have implied 'you' as the subject.
6. Students should be comfortable with Tasks 1-4 on the Analytical Task Sheet.

Also make sure that you yourselves understand the material! :)

Turning to IEW, this week's lesson is similar to last week. Students are once again using a KWO to retell a story in their own words. Our new dress-up is five-sense adjectives. Depending on ability, skill level and available time, students may complete one, two or three paragraphs. When you look at rough drafts, mark and discuss run-on sentences. I am seeing quite a few!

OK. They're great kids. I'm enjoying them immensely. Yesterday blessed me in so many ways. (By the way, I knew a Jonathan with blonde hair. That's my trick.)

Have a fabulous week at home. At our house, we're doing school outside to soak in this perfect weather!

See you Tuesday for an enormous Week 6!

Erin