Week 17: We can certainly call our students smart!

Well, we did it. It took 17 weeks of class, but we've learned all seven sentence patterns of the English language. Isn't that exciting!

Practice the seventh sentence pattern, S-Vt-DO-OCA, at home this week. Read Lesson 17 in your EEL Guide for suggestions on recognizing the sentences, and, with your student, try to write a couple of simple S-Vt-DO-OCA sentences on your own. Write them, label them, diagram them, QeQ them. If your student is ambitious, modify them with adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions. Then celebrate what you've learned this year!

I imagine you'll spend most of your time this week polishing IEW papers. I can't wait to read these! The kids have worked so hard! In class yesterday, they helped me revise a rough draft I wrote. They suggested some great ideas for improvement, and I hope this exercise will bear fruit when it comes to their own revisions this week.

Spend time today and tomorrow revising. Then complete your checklist (Level A or B) Friday and Monday. If an item or two is missing from the checklist for each paragraph, it's no big deal. Eventually we want them to write "free" of the checklist because their minds will be trained to write automatically using strong verbs; interesting words; and varied sentence structures, openers, and lengths. I DO think they'll need your help with the checklist and labeling, though. It's not easy to identify, label and check off all those elements at once. They will complete the assignment much more easily and significantly faster with your help.

I will plan extra reading time next week. I want everyone to have the opportunity to show off their work!

A final note: I am altering our syllabus a bit. Rather than following this four-week assignment with another lengthy report as scheduled, we're going to skip ahead to "Writing from Pictures." We'll come back to the research report in four weeks and let that be our final assignment for the year. At that point, the students will each choose a character from ancient history to write about. On Week 24, the kids can dress as their characters, and we'll spend most of our class time presenting those reports and having a little party.

Let me know if you have questions this week. I'll look forward to seeing you all Tuesday!