Week three

(Write on board)

While Zach travelled to church, Katie walked with him.

James 1:2-4
Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.

Prayer

This week begins the real digging in. For you younger students, it may still feel like an overwhelming amount of information. However, for you older students, you really need to pay attention to all of it, and get what you can from it.

For all of you, you really need to be working on your charts daily. If you don’t work on the charts, you won’t get it. Memorizing the charts really is training your brain to retain (Leigh Bortins).

Parents, I encourage you to challenge your students on the charts. My kids usually surprise me with how much they are able to memorize. Try taking away the original, even though she may not know it perfectly yet. Also, verbally drill the charts. Also, you can work on the charts with your kids; race them like I did last week. Most important thing – do it every day.

Speaking of charts, you’ll need to look at charts E and F while I’m teaching today.

What we’ll be doing
Today, we are going to talk about nouns and pronouns. These are the “who” and “what” of the sentence. Nouns and Pronouns play many vital roles in our language. They are also key in learning new languages. Today, we are going to cover the many properties of nouns and pronouns.

Our goal is to give you younger students a framework (I know another overview) and to give you older students a deep understanding of these two parts of speech.

We are also going to talk about some purposes of a sentence.

Declarative/Exclamatory

Quickly, let’s talk about the purposes. These will be the easy part of our day.

A declarative sentence makes a statement, or expresses a fact or idea.

Everyone write on your board a Declarative sentence.

Now change it to exclamatory.

That’s right. An exclamatory sentence is just like a declarative, but you say it differently. How do we know that we need to say it differently? (!)

You guys got this. That was the easy part of our day.

Nouns

Now, let’s talk about nouns. Who can give me the definition of a noun?

That’s right; a noun names a (on board) person, place, thing, activity or idea.

Usage

Most important thing we’ll learn about nouns is the idea of usage, or the different jobs that a noun does. These are listed on chart E, right in the middle. Nouns can be subjects, possessives, indirect objects, direct objects or objects of prepositions. They can also be predicate nominatives, objective complement nouns, nouns of direct address, or appositives. All we really need to focus on today is the subject.

Can anyone tell me what a subject is? (Who or what the sentence is about)

Monica went to the store.

My dog ate my homework.

The beautiful city lights twinkled like stars against the night sky.

You also need to know that nouns usually do not have to change form to have a different job.

You can say: I love my dog.

Dog is doing a new job in this sentence. It’s no longer the subject, but it’s the same word.

So, the first job that a noun can serve is a subject.

Type

We also need to understand that there are different types of nouns.

Nouns can be common or proper, concrete or abstract, collective and compound.

Proper nouns name a specific person, place, thing, activity or idea.

Proper nouns are names. Can anyone tell me some proper nouns? (people, cities, countries, companies)

Common nouns are just the opposite. They name a non-specific person, place, thing, activity or idea.

When you use a common noun, you aren’t talking about a specific person, place, etc. But about these things in general.

Use a common noun for every proper noun on the board.

Then, we have concrete and abstract nouns, which are also opposites.

Concrete nouns name a physical object that can be experienced with the five senses. If you can touch it, taste it, hear it, smell it or see it, it is a concrete noun. – examples on board

Abstract nouns, in contrast, name a concept, quality or condition that cannot be experienced with the five senses. These are the ideas. Let me give you two examples, and then you can come up with some on your own. Freedom, happiness. (moms help, too)

There are also collective and compound nouns. These are not opposites.

Collective nouns refer to a group composed of members.

Examples: herd, flock, church, class, children, men, women, and etc. These are nouns that talk about more than one person or thing, but they are not plural. You wouldn’t say, “The herd are loose.” Or “The class are happy today.”

Compound nouns are made up of two or more words joined together.

Examples: doorknob, lifesaver, homework, etc.

Any questions about nouns?

Pronouns

Pronouns have different types, too, but they are different than types of nouns.

(Go over chart. Use as base for instruction.)

Personal, reflexive, relative, interrogative, demonstrative and indefinite.

We memorized these last year.

Number

Nouns and pronouns both have number.

They can be singular or plural. (Cat/cats, store/store, person/people) (I/we, he/they)

Usually add “s” to make plural.

Gender

Gender matters more with pronouns than most nouns. However, the gender of the pronoun must match the gender of the noun it replaces. You wouldn’t say, “Judy is a nice girl. He is coming to my house.”

Some examples of nouns – chart B. (noun or pronoun, person/place/thing/etc, sing/pl)

Questions?

Tasks

This week, we are going to introduce our analytical tasks. We are going to start taking the information that we are memorizing and using it in real-sentence situations. For you older students, your goal should be to be doing all 6 tasks by the end of the year. For the younger students, you may not get past the first or second task this year. That’s ok.

Here are the tasks:

Task 1: Dictate sentence to the student to write down.

Task 2: Check the mechanics of the sentence. – is it spelled correctly, Capitalized, end mark?

Task 3: Label every word using question confirmation, then classify the sentence with its purpose, structure and pattern.

Task 4: Diagram the sentence.

Task 5: Rewrite the sentence by altering its purpose and structure.

Task 6: Identify all the details of each individual word in the sentence.

What you should try to do this week is tasks 1-3. Starting on page 49, the Guide goes into detail about how to do these tasks. You may want to mark this page somehow; you’ll need to come back to it throughout the year.

So, parents, look at page 69. This is the sentence that you’ll do with your child tomorrow. There should be five sentences like these each week. Your kids will write the sentence, as you dictate, on their Quid et Quo chart. Then younger kids, you will ask them the questions under #2 Check mechanics. Older kids, ask yourselves these questions. Then, you can ask the questions under #3 Question confirmation. IF you follow these questions, you should be able to help your children identify the main parts of the sentence.

Questions?

Page 63 gives you your list of assignments for this week.

Editing rule #3

Charts E/F – keep working on old charts if not mastered.