Week 17: Sickness on Essentials days makes your tutor unhappy!

Dear students and moms,

I'm so sorry not to have been there today. I went to bed fine last night but woke up this morning feeling horrible -- fever, chills, aches, congestion, the works. But I'm glad the kids were able to sit in under Ivey, and I hope everyone received the IEW lesson and vocabulary I sent.

Needless to say, this post will be short so I can go back to bed. :)

Here are the EEL sentences I'd planned to use in class today to illustrate our seventh and final sentence pattern, S-Vt-DO-OCA:

1. Maggie painted the walls of her room blue.
2. The excellent science fair projects made competition for first prize stiff.
3. Jesus calls me holy.
4. The campaign declared the election successful.
5. The students' perfect behavior made their teacher happy.
6. Jack found the roller coaster exhilarating.

You can use these, or the ones from the guide, or your own at home this week for practice and diagramming. I'd also suggest modifying a couple by changing them from simple to complex and then diagramming again.

The other thing I'd planned to cover in EEL was an adjective review. We were going to look at descriptive, limiting and possessive adjectives, as well as adjectives of degree (positive, comparative, superlative.) Consult your guides and the associated charts for good information.

The IEW assignment, Lesson 18, is a ONE-WEEK assignment. Level A students may retell their story in one paragraph; Level B assigns three graphs. The idea is for the kids to take a fairytale, recast it with characters from the Middle Ages, and rewrite in their own words. I made up a sheet and photocopied it into the lesson that suggests additional fairytales the kids could use and also some character possibilities. Please note my suggestion that, if the assignment to change characters is blowing their brains, just rewrite the fairytale "as is" without any character alterations. Keep it simple. I'd rather have them writing confidently than stumbling over a blank page.

IEW does introduce www.asia.b clauses this week, both as sentence openers and as dress-ups in a sentence. We've already covered them in EEL, but please point out the change to the kids as they write so they're not surprised when it comes to their checklists.

OK. I hope and pray to see everyone next week.

Erin