Week 7: Students, study adverbs, appositives, and nouns of direct address diligently.

Sorry for the delayed post. We introduced an abundance of new information during EEL yesterday and a new way of key word outlining source texts during IEW. Y'all have a fun and full week of learning ahead at home!

For EEL, the guide does a superb job describing the imperative sentence pattern with S-Vt-DO, nouns of direct address, appositives, and adverbs. Spend time working with all of those using the guide and the nouns and adverbs charts. The guide also touches on verb mood, so those who have advanced students may want to identify the difference between indicative and imperative mood as well. It's not difficult to grasp.

Your IEW assignment introduces the idea and structure of topical paragraphs. We are supposed to take information that is scattered throughout a source text and arrange it into three topical paragraphs that contain topic sentences, details and clinchers. This structure is outlined in the IEW Resouce Guide (the free online download) and will eventually become a five-paragraph report for us that utilizes an introductory paragraph, three body paragraphs and a conclusion graph. I'd like for y'all to look over this structure with them and emphasize to the students how important the pattern is here. They will use it over and over and over again throughout their academic careers, and I believe it serves to help them organize their thoughts when speaking as well. The idea of writing a topic sentence, supporting it with details and clinching it with a final sentence that reflects and repeats key words from the topic sentence gives them a basic skeleton to fall back on time and time again.

Before they choose which facts they want to include in their outlines, I suggested yesterday that they go through the source text and underline all the doctor facts in one color, the superstition facts in another color, then the medicine facts in yet another color. Then let them choose the five to seven facts they find most interesting or most important regarding each topic.

If y'all have questions, let me know. Only the three rough draft paragraphs are due next week. Finals will be due the following week.

Finally, thanks to everyone for their patience and participation with pictures yesterday. I hope we got some great shots of our handsome brood!

Erin