Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Week 5: Can you question?

EEL families,

Today flew by as we learned how to change declarative sentences to interrogatives during our EEL time and talked in IEW about how to take a BORING story and rewrite it in an exciting and intriguing way. The students impressed me with their paragraphs on Jamestown; I'm eager to hear the rest next week.

At home this week, spend your EEL time reviewing memory work and charts and dialoging through simple S-Vi sentences that morph from declarative to exclamatory to imperative to interrogative. Then have fun diagramming them! Pay close attention to the three different ways we can make a sentence interrogative:




  • Add a helping verb: "The dog eats" becomes "Did the dog eat?"


  • Replace the subject noun with an interrogative subject pronoun: "The dog eats" becomes "Who ate?"


  • Change your voice inflection: "The dog eats" remains "The dog eats?" but we change our voice tones to indicate we're asking a question.


Also remember that the subject of an imperative sentence is always what we call "implied you." By week's end, you will want to have spent time working with simple S-Vi sentences of all four sentence purposes. Next week, we finally get to move on to our second sentence pattern: S-Vt-DO. Yeah!



Our IEW assignment is to begin writing a three-paragraph story about the Mayflower. The final polished product will take us two weeks, but at home between now and next Tuesday, you are responsible for the following:





  • three key word outlines,


  • brainstorming quality verbs, -ly words, five senses adjectives and feelings,


  • and three rough draft paragraphs.


I encouraged the kids today to consider how they can use words to create scenes and evoke images in their readers' or listeners' minds of the events happening in their stories. I can't wait to hear what they come up with! Their creativity, I suspect, is boundless. :)



Please let me know if you have questions. Thank you for sharing time in community with me today. It's a privilege to be with you and your children!



Erin





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