Week 13 - Warning: Massive Blog Entry

Welcome back and Happy New Year!  It was wonderful to see your faces again this afternoon. I hope you had a wonderful break, especially considering that we packed the day full of new information.

EEL

Not only did we introduce a new sentence pattern, we also dove right into a new structure.

If you own them, your Our Mother Tongue lessons from the checklist will really help you this week because they will hammer away the information we learned.

Sentence pattern S/Vt/IO/DO

What is an indirect object?
1) a noun
2) only occurs in sentences with direct objects
3) located between the verb and the direct object.
4) received indirect action of the verb
5) answers the question "(subject) (verb) (DO) to/for what/whom?

Examples:

Lisa gave Hank a shoe.
Gave (Vt) + shoe (DO) . . . to or for whom or what? Answer = Hank (IO)

The present gave me joy!
Gave + joy ... to whom? = me

To see a diagram of the S/Vt/IO/DO, please look below at the Complex, S/Vt/IO/DO diagram.

Complex Sentence

Simple sentence = independent clause
Compound sentence = independent clause + independent clause
Complex sentence = independent clause + dependent (subordinate) clause

Dependent (subordinate) Clause vs. Phrase

Dependent clauses and phrases both cannot stand alone in a sentence.  The big difference is that a dependent clause will have both a subject and a verb.   The phrase will not.

While I wandered the desert . . .
In the desert . . .

The first is a clause with a subject (I) and a verb (wandered).
The second is a prepositional phrase and has no S/V.

Adjectival vs. Adverbial Subordinate Clauses

Adjectival subordinate clauses are those clauses that are used as an adjective in a sentence.
When trying to determine whether a clause is adjectival, go to the questions that you memorized to determine if a word is an adjective (What kind? How many? Which? Whose?)  If the clause answers one of these questions, it is adjectival.

Another quick way to identify whether a clause is adjectival is to see whether it begins with a relative pronoun (have to be memorized).  The list of relative pronouns is in the memory work.  It begins with the word who.  As a possible memory help, I always think of describing a relative, who is a who (a person).  The word describing helps me think of adjective.

These are already familiar to us through IEW in the Who/Which clauses.

The adverbial clause works the same way, except it answers the adverb questions, (How? When? Where? Why? To what extent? How often? How much? Under what condition?) and the adverbial clause begins with subordinating conjunctions (www.asia.wub).


The Subordinate Clause and Comma Use

In most sentences, the subordinate clause will be separated by commas.  The exception is when the clause is necessary to the meaning of the noun it modifies.

The family that lives around the corner has eight kids.

We will be practicing this in class.

Try to find the subordinate (dependent) clauses in the following sentences. I didn't put in commas.

When we took a break from school for Christmas I forgot all my memory work.
We love because he first loved us.
My parents who like to surprise my sisters and me won't tell us where we are going for our family vacation.

Diagramming a Subordinate Clause (and S/Vt/IO/DO)

The teacher, who read the class a story, sent me a recording.

We follow the diagram examples from the Essentials guide.  Most sentence diagramming sources prescribe a different way of diagramming the IO.  Please feel free to choose one and stick with it.  We will be using the way it is presented in the guide.  The important thing is that the kids are able to identify the usage in the sentences.

Grammar (Drill)

Memorize this week's memory work.

Review the questions used to determine if a word (or clause) is an adverb or an adjective. (Charts I, L)

Dialectic (Understanding)

Work through the task sheet to diagram some S/Vt/IO/DO sentences.  Come up with three or four per day that fit the pattern then task one of them.  Here are some to get you started.

I bought my friend a birthday gift.

The boy read his sister a book.

Mom baked the kids a cake.

The pirates gave the prisoners a choice between being marooned or walking the plank.

Lucky gave me the pot of gold from the end of the rainbow.

Next, work through some complex sentences.

OVERLOADED? If this is new to the student, please just drill the idea that a subordinate clause + and independent clause = complex sentence.  Next, get to what a subordinate clause is.

IEW

Vocabulary words: incessant, zealous, trepidation, exemplary, prominent, privily, affirm, espouse
Some kind of treat for anyone (yes, moms, you too) who brings in a complex sentence containing a vocabulary word from this week's vocabulary list. Underline your subordinate clause.

Here comes mine. Because she is zealous for complex sentences, Mrs. Varnell, a prominent tutor in the Essentials class (ok, the only one), overcame her trepidation about overwhelming everyone and insisted on incessantly affirming the exemplary virtues of the subordinate clause for a full fifty-five minutes without taking a breath. Bam!

Try two: Because she loves her exemplary students, Mrs. Varnell rewards with candy.

IEW Lesson 22
We began a new unit today, Unit 6: Library Research Report.  The first lesson in this unit (Lesson 22) focuses on the skill of taking information from two sources and making it into one paragraph.   The result is a paragraph written from a fused outline.

There is a chart across from the Unit 6 outline in the IEW Charts section of the student notebook that helps illustrate this process of creating a fused outline.

We used the source text on page 156 about Thomas Jefferson.
We did a KWO of source one (remembering to start with a topic sentence).
We did a KWO of source two (remembering to start with a topic sentence).
Next, we put aside our source texts and just looked at our two key word outlines.
We ended up with 5 facts from the first outline and 7 from the second.

Next, we began a fused outline.
We created a fused topic sentence, looking at the source 1 and 2 topic sentences and combining info.
From there, we eliminated redundant information, merged like information, regrouped information, reordered information, and cut information.
We whittled down the information until we had only 5-7 (not 12) lines of KWO.
Finally, we added a clincher that repeated and reflected the topic sentence.
This was our fused outline.

I leave titles up to each of you.

Since we did this in class, I hope you copied well.  If you wrote down the fused outline, you only have to write the paragraph! Make sure you use your IEW checklist to be sure you include all the dress ups and decorations.

Whew! You made it.  Go eat a piece of dark chocolate. Reward yourself.