Week 7: Students, study your adverb lists, and Moms, rejoice in the goodness of God.

Class Overview

Wow! Week seven already.  Yesterday we covered so many concepts: compound imperative sentences, nouns of direct address, appositives and adverbs.  Throughout our discussion, we also reviewed how to determine whether a verb is transitive or intransitive.

Compound Imperative

First, we changed the purpose of our compound declarative sentences, making them imperative.

Megan eats Cheerios, but Ryan devours tofu.  (became) Megan, eat Cheerios, but Ryan, devour tofu.

Nouns of Direct Address

We hammered away at the fact that the subject of an imperative sentence is ALWAYS you or implied you.  So if the subject is you in our example, then restated, it could say You eat Cheerios, but You devour tofu.  Stating it this way allowed us to see that the names, added for clarification, help determine who is being addressed.  Thus, they are nouns of direct address (NDA).

Appositives

An appositive is a noun that follows another noun and explains or identifies it.

Megan, the baby, eats Cheerios.
Ryan, the eleven year old, devours tofu.

The baby and the eleven year old are our appositives.  We came up with so many examples and each student contributed a different clarifier.  Megan was a trail-hiker, a dog, an aerobics instructor, and a grandmother at different points. In my first class, Henry was a girl.  We decided it was short for Henrietta.

We also covered a few rules for appositives.  They are always separated by commas, and the appositive always follows the preceding noun.  So if we turn around the example and make it,

The baby, Megan, eats Cheerios.

Megan would now be the appositive.

Adverbs

Finally, we made it to adverbs!  We took a look at Chart I (Adverbs).  If you are new to Essentials, I told you to memorize the gray boxes, the definition of an adverb and the questions to ask when determining if a word is an adverb.  If you do nothing else this week for EEL, work on memorizing this list!  There is really no way around it, and it clears up so much muck in the diagramming process if you can pull it from your memory instead of from a page.

If you are not new to Essentials and you already have the list nailed, please work on the rest of Chart I, identifying simple, flexion, negative, affirmative and multi-word (subordinating) adverbial phrases.  Also, take a look at the degrees that an adverb can be.

We introduced all the adverb types and focused on the tricky, negative adverbs.  We said that not is not a verb.  We repeated this over and over.  Please do this with your child at home this week.  Make a game of it.  At random moments, say, "Not..." and make them finish, "is not a verb."  You can even tie it off with a nice neat bow by having them add, "It's an adverb."

We tackled the example,

My cat, Bob, can't learn tricks.

First we had to separate the contraction.

My cat, Bob, can not learn tricks.

Then we identified our subject and verb.  Subject, cat, Verb, can learn.  We talked about how not is not part of the verb.  It is the adverb.  So when we diagrammed this sentence, it looked like this.

Here is the mega diagram that we did at the end of class, incorporating our compound, imperative, verb transitive, noun of direct address and adverb elements.

Grammar (Drill)

Memorize the list of questions to determine if a word is an adverb (Chart I, gray boxes)
Review the question that you ask when determining if a verb is transitive or intransitive (verb, who or what?).
Work on memory work through week 7.
Drill Not is not a verb, it's an adverb.

Dialectic (Understanding)

Work through all elements we covered this week, incorporating them into sentences to use with the task sheet.  Here are some sample sentences for you (more in back of lesson 7 in EEL guide).

Cats rub legs, but dogs lick faces.
Tom, the bus driver, happily sings.
Sharon, don't taste the snow!
Kelly, swim a lap slowly, but Henry, run a mile quickly.

And for those of you who are diagramming gurus,

Jake, my son, unless you clean your room thoroughly, you will be eating kidney pie and liver and onions for a month.