Week 8: At home, study prepositional phrases.

What delightful children you are raising! I am loving the papers they are writing in IEW, and they are picking up the EEL concepts well, too. Sharp, sharp, sharp!

During our EEL time yesterday, we focused on prepositional phrases. I used a stool as a visual example and placed myself beside the stool, atop the stool, behind the stool, in front of the stool, beneath the stool, etc. You can do this at home with any object, or you can pull a Dr. Seuss book off the shelf -- they are usually loaded with prepositional phrases, so have fun searching them out.

Use your memory work to memorize the definition of a preposition, and use either the EEL chart or the IEW list to familiarize yourselves with the preposition lists. Older students should try to identify prepositional phrases as adverbial or adjectival. But please know we'll be doing that in class all year long because we have to decide where to place the phrases on our sentence diagrams.

One vastly important note about prepositions -- they do not stand alone. They are always the first word of a prepositional phrase and thus always have an object. Many words on the preposition list can function as stand-alone adverbs, which can be tricky. For instance, if I say, "The bear crawled over," the word over is an adverb that tells me where the bear crawled. But if I say, "The bear crawled over the fallen log," over is a preposition and log is the object of the preposition, and the entire phrase is adverbial because it again tells where.

We have one more week to devote to compound S-Vt-DO sentences. So, during your study time, take two or more simple sentences of this pattern, add a FANBOYS to make them compound, then dress them up with prepositional phrases, adverbs, appositives, interjections, nouns of direct address -- anything we've studied so far -- and diagram as much as you can! If you hit a wall because you've created a larger sentence than you know how to diagram, don't worry. Go as far as you can and celebrate what you've already accomplished. :)

During our diagramming time yesterday, I handed out a green sheet titled "Simple Steps." This is a Q&A, similar to the one in the guide, that takes you through the tasks of identifying our sentence parts. However, this one is my own version. I put it together for Maggie a few years back. You are not required to use it, but here's why I like it. The EEL tasks direct us to identify the subject and verb first. I start in a different place -- with prepositional phrases, then conjunctions -- in order to isolate the main body of our sentence. THEN we go after our subject and verb. I believe, as the sentences become longer and more complex, it's easier to locate our main parts if we have all the "extras" set aside with parentheses. So see if you like it, but again, it's not required. I'll try to remember the extra copies next week for those who asked.

Moving at last onto IEW, the students are responsible for polishing their rough draft paragraphs and adding an introductory statement and a final clincher to their three-paragraph report on caring for the sick during colonial times. I believe they all understood this in class, and an example to follow is stapled to their assignment page.

We are two-thirds of the way through our semester. Hard to believe, isn't it? Y'all are doing great! Have a fantastic week. Please let me know if you have questions.

Erin