Yesterday in class, there were Mischievous Monkeys and Marshmallow-Cat-Eating Dogs!

First, I would like to thank all of you who gave me such lovely gifts. It was so thoughtful. It felt like early Christmas. Hugs! Thanks!


Class Overview

Review, review, review!

Yesterday we reviewed verbs and dressed up sentences with modifiers, but I hope that today and tomorrow the only reviewing you do is the final checklist for Thanksgiving shopping and the only dressing up you do is looking presentable for well-loved relatives, well, that and dressing up a pile of mashed potatoes with gravy.

Wow! All that was one sentence.

Have a marvelous Thanksgiving and Christmas! God bless you as you travel and gather with family tomorrow.

Week 11: Review is productive. S/Vl/PA

Thank you for switching around the way we did class today so that I could get back to my sick kiddos. It really helped to be gone only for an hour.  Thanks, Tina and Cynthia, for being so flexible, and thanks, moms, for enduring a combined class two weeks in a row.  Hopefully the crud will move on and we will be able to get back to normal next week.

Class Overview

Review!  We began with a pop quiz of sorts.  I pulled out the memory work cards to find out how much memory work has been mastered.  The students, of course, are at different levels of mastery.  Second and third year students and Memory Masters have an advantage because they have been exposed to the information more, but all students should have been somewhat familiar with the terms.

Moms, if you do nothing else, drill memory work.  This is priority number one for making headway in EEL.

Next, we worked through a few Charlie Brown sentences from the beloved Pig Pen.  Click here to get the complete document (with answers, Moms).  It really is quite a bit harder to be given a sentence and told to identify the structure rather than working from a given structure and knowing that the sentence probably fits that pattern.

Fianally, we worked through Task 5 on the task sheet.  I was thrilled to be able to go this far in tasking; the review week lends to more time for this exercise.  Definitely begin integrating Task 5 in with your task sheets this week.  Our sentence this week was Sarah, my neighbor, became bold, and Macy remained shy. (SN, (appositive)/Vl/PA, cc, SN/Vl/PA)

Grammar

Drill memory work.
Review charts.

Dialectic

Use the task sheets, through task five, to work through sentences.
Identify sentence patterns using the Pig Pen worksheet. This resource only uses the first four sentence structures that we have already covered.  Click the link above, or copy the following web address in your browser to download the document.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/75809442/Week11%20Pig%20Pen%20and%20sentence%20structures.pdf

If you would rather, use some of these sample sentences:
My dad laughed loudly.
God's promise was a rainbow. (Well, I know that the actual promise wasn't the rainbow, but work with me for the sake of sentence structure).
My mother, Cindy, loves me and cares for me.
Seth felt happy.
The boy on the bike rode through town, but I stayed on the playground.
Tom tricked his friends, and they whitewashed the fence.
A peacock is a fancy bird.
The football team's mascot was not a tiger.
I eat hot dogs, but she likes tacos.
Jeremy and Nathan wrote the sentence.

Moms and students, if you get stuck please refer to the Simple Steps for Solving Sentences sheet in the student notebook (toward back of the EEL portion, blue/green sheet).  It will lead you through the right questions to determine things like DO, PA, and PN.

If you are still stuck on a sentence you can email me.  We will work through it together and ask the right questions to determine the answer.  This is all about the thinking and analyzing process that leads to truth (even if Macy remains shy).

In closing, I would like to share my favorite S/Vl/PN sentence.

God is love!
Can I switch them?
Love is God!
Yes, I can. He doesn't have love--He is love!  So, the only way we can love others is to have Him move in us.  What a glorious thought.  Everything good and pleasant comes from who He is.

Week 10: Class was lovely, and my students remain clever.

Class Overview

Grammar Rule

We really nailed the who/which clause (7a,b  pp. 74-75).  These clauses help add more detail to a sentence and can combine two short sentences into one.  They are set off by commas.  If the clause is removed, the remaining words should still be a complete sentence.  Also, we talked about the fact that an invisible who/which can sometimes be mistaken for an appositive and that, in those instances, an argument can be made for going either way.

Adjectives

We looked at Chart L, Adjectives.  On this chart, as on all charts, the gray boxes are the most important to master.  These provide the definition: adjectives modify a noun or pronoun by describing, qualifying or limiting.  And the gray boxes also tell us the most important thing to remember about adjectives, that they answer the questions, 

What kind? 

How many? 

Which? 

Whose?

Drill these questions! 

We answered these questions by modifying the word cat.  What kind? tabby cat, How many? all cats, Which? the sleepy cat, Whose? Jane's cat

S/Vl/PA

This week, we continued to focus on compound, declarative sentences, but we introduced a new sentence pattern, S/Vl/PA.

We learned that a predicate adjective can modify or describe the subject, and a linking verb is never an action verb.  Those are the two key components to understanding the S/Vl/PA pattern.

The questions that you need to ask to identify an S/Vl/PA are...
1) Who or what is this sentence about?  Answer: subject
2) What is that subject doing? action? being?  Answer: verb
3) Now ask, could the verb be linking? (from memorized list and used as state of being?)
4) Does an adjective that describes or modifies the subject follow the linking verb?
Answer: S/Vl/PA

We looked at the example The rose is red, and then substituted other linking verbs from the list to show how a predicate adjective describes or modifies the subject.  So, The rose is red, became, The rose...smells beautiful, became wilted, feels soft, grows limp.  Notice that all the verbs could be replaced with the word is. This demonstrates that the linking verb remains a state of being, not an action.

Next, we talked about the pitfall of mistaking action verbs for linking verbs (or vice versa).
The rose smells beautiful. (State of being, could be The rose is beautiful.) S/Vl/PA
She smells the rose. (Action verb, could not be She is the rose.) S/Vt/DO

We also spent some time using the task sheet to work the sentence, Nathan feels happy, and Jenny seems content.  This sentence is a compound, S/Vl/PA.  The line between the linking verb and predicate adjective is just like the predicate nominative line. It slants back toward the subject.

I neglected to diagram other adjectives in a sentence, but will do that next week.  They go on a slanted line just like adverbs, except they go under the word that they modify.

Grammar

Drill memory work.
Memorize the questions used to identify adjectives.
Memorizing the linking verbs.  There is a song to help on the sidebar of this blog. This will make identifying S/Vl/PN and S/Vl/PA easier.  Especially focus on the "to be" verbs (am, are, is, was, were, being, been).
Review charts.

Dialectic

Use the task sheets to work through sentences.

Sample sentences
The flowers smell lovely, and the bride looks beautiful.
The day remains sunny, though the forecast is dreary.
Greensboro is small, but North Carolina is large.
Voting is responsible, yet it can feel challenging.
Books are thrilling, and reading is fun.
The candy was yummy, and Mom remains happy.
The shiny apple looked tasty, yet it was rotten on the inside.