Week 11: I may be a teacher, but my students are blessings!

Good morning! How difficult to believe we've only one week left in our semester! I'm really pleased with the kids' progress these 11 weeks. I believe they're right where they need to be, both my newbies and my returning students. I hope you're pleased at home as well. :)

EEL at home this week and through our holiday break should consist mostly of review. Spend your time together writing, dressing up and then classifying our first four sentence patterns. To give them practice identifying those coordinating conjunctions, compose compound sentences using a combination of patterns. Encourage dressing up the sentences with adjectives, adverbs and prepositional phrases. Discuss how you could change the sentence purpose from declarative to interrogative to imperative to exclamatory. Then choose one of those purposes to classify and diagram. Here's an example:

Start with, "The puppy was tired, but he chased the squirrel." (compound, declarative, S-VL-PA/S-VT-DO)

Then dress it up: "The puppy with black spots was obviously tired, but he chased the gray squirrel around the sunny backyard for an hour."

How could you change the sentence purpose?

1. "Even though the puppy was tired, did he chase the squirrel for an hour?" (This interrogative changes the structure to complex, but it's certainly acceptable; just don't try to diagram it yet!)
2. "Tired puppy, chase the squirrel for an hour!" (Both imperative and exclamatory; "Tired puppy" becomes a noun of direct address, which we did diagram a few weeks back.)

Then simply choose a purpose to classify and diagram. Along the way, ask questions like, "Is your subject noun singular or plural? Is it first, second or third person? What kind of pronoun is "he"? Anything to pull information out of their brains!

Another twist would be for the kids to compose the sentences. Challenge them to choose an action verb or a being verb and compose a simple sentence from there. Then change it to compound. Then dress it up. Then try to classify and diagram!

The one new thing this week is our memory work. I'd like the kids to practice the principal parts of the verbs "be" and "have." We looked at the verb anatomy charts, located in Appendix D of your guides and in their Student Resource Notebooks, for these yesterday. These two charts are what I want them to master over break. Don't make it a hassle at home. Just ask them to complete each chart a couple of times a week. They'll get it. There is a blank chart in the student charts section of the guide, and I photocopied this for their notebooks also. I'll try to attach the page in an email if I can figure out how to separate it from the rest of the guide electronically; that way they can either complete it on a sheet protector with a dry erase or on paper with a pencil.

I'm guessing you'll spend more time at home this week writing, polishing and practicing the presentation of the IEW "Faces of Medieval History" paper. That's okay. Please email or call if you have any questions. The kids should turn in their papers, rough drafts, checklists and bibliography when they present next week.

Finally, I talked with the kids at the beginning of class yesterday about our Gilded Coupon Campaign. Next week, I'll bring Samaritan's Purse Gift Catalogs to class and let the kids redeem their coupons for catalog items. For those who don't remember or weren't with me last year, here's why we do it and how it works:

The kids have worked hard this semester. Their labor has earned them coupons (which I usually call tickets). Based on Acts 20:35, which says, "It is more blessed to give than to receive," I structure our first semester ticket recemption as a time of giving and our second semester tickets as a time of receiving.

Next Tuesday, each student will turn in the tickets he or she earned over the semester in return for a cash credit. I haven't figured it yet, but each ticket will be worth somewhere around 20 to 25 cents each. So a kid who's earned 20 tickets will be credited somewhere between $4 and $5. On top of that, I offer the kids a chance to double, triple or quadruple their giving by contributing some of their own money. I have two sponsors who will match their giving up to $5 each. For example, a child who earns $5 in tickets and contributes $5 of his own will receive $5 from each sponsor (so $10), for a total of $20 to spend in the Samaritan's Purse catalog.

When we did this last year, the kids' response was an unbelievable blessing to me. They were SO excited to participate! Not a single one of them seemed to mind that they weren't GETTING anything to take home with them. I can't wait to see them "shop" next week!

But if any of this is confusing, let me know, and I'll try to explain more.

Have a wonderful time at home with your kids this week. They're precious!

Erin