Essentials - Week one (4th or 5th Edition)

Write on the board:

The boy yelled “Help!” and he saw a brave dog quickly run to the rescue.

112 chart

Sample sentences from below

WELCOME to Essentials.

3 parts –

Essentials of the English Language

Math Games

IEW – or Institute for Excellence in Writing

Let’s open in prayer

Colossians 3:17: And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

Let’s study English grammar to the glory of God.

Let’s go over what will be expected of you in this class:

• Be open to learning

• Participate in a positive and encouraging way

• Take ownership and responsibility for keeping all your stuff together and bringing it each week to class. It is not your mom’s job!

What do you need to bring to this class?

Essentials guide

Trivium tables

IEW books – student and teacher

When you come to class each week:

• Be prompt and early. To be on time is to be late

• Place IEW homework on the back table in the box

• Take a dry erase board

• Sit down and work on punctuation and capitalization or activity problem on the board.

• Return all to the box at the end of class

OK. Now that our housekeeping is out of the way, let’s get to know each other a little bit.

Snowballs.

Write one thing about yourself that no one here would know.

Throw the snowballs at each other.

Grab one; read it and try to figure out who’s it is.

OK. Now that we know each other a little bit better, let’s get started.

• Who has studied Grammar before?

• What curriculum did you use?

• What’s the last thing you remember studying?

• How many parts of speech can you remember?

• Noun

• Verb

• Pronoun

• Adjective

• Interjection

• Conjunction

• Adverb

• Preposition

Let’s see what you know: (write on board)

The boy yelled “Help!” and he saw a brave dog quickly run to the rescue.
Why does it even matter?

• When people want to communicate with one another, whether it’s talking with them or writing to them, they do it with sentences.

• Understanding sentences helps to get your ideas across to other people.

So sentences are important!

You need to know that EEL studies the English Language a bit differently than we may be used to…

Let’s check it out:

• EEL teaches the English Language in a similar way to building a puzzle.

• We are going to spend this school year putting the “puzzle” together.

Weeks 1 & 2

• The outer edges of the puzzle

– An overview of the entire English language.

– The “Big Picture”

Week 3 and onwards

• The inner pieces of the puzzle

– The details of the material

Most importantly, this is a three year class. If this is your first tour through Essentials, you will be overwhelmed. It will be ok. It will all start to make sense. You don’t have to know it all your first year.

The English Language is actually quite concrete and fixed. It is precise, defined and specific, not vague and ambiguous (as some suspect).

Like the rest of God’s creation, language has structure and order. (I believe that this is because God is the author of language, as we can read in the book of Genesis.)

Because it has structure and order, it can be mastered through studying and understanding its rules and parameters.

Also, if you haven’t read through this first lesson, it is a good idea to do so before teaching at home tomorrow.

The big picture – sentences.

What do we already know about sentences?

• A sentence is - A group of words that express a complete thought

• Each sentence must:

1. contain a subject (who or what the sentence is about)

2. contain a predicate (includes the verb, and tells what the subject is doing or being)

3. make complete sense

4. start with a capital letter

5. end with a punctuation mark

We will study sentences in great detail in order to classify (categorize) them. Sentence classification is the backbone of EEL.

We classify using three components: structure, purpose and pattern.

- Now, just to warn you, there are 112 unique sentence classifications. It might sound daunting, but it’s really not that hard if we break it down.

- Break out your trivium table – English Grammar.

- There are four structures – how is the sentence built? (simple, compound, complex, compound-complex

- Four purposes – the intent or function of the sentence (declarative, exclamatory, interrogative, imperative)

- Finally, there are seven patterns – this is the arrangement of words in a sentence. This is possibly the most important aspect of mastering grammar. The seven patterns are: S-Vi, S-Vt-DO, S-Vl-PN, S-Vl-PA, S-Vt-IO-DO, S-Vt-DO-OCN, S-Vt-DO-OCA.

- Can you figure out how we can make 112 different combinations from this chart?

Let kids try to come up with a few examples

Ex – Jesus wept.

Jesus wept! --------changed purpose

Jesus wept? (Write on board before class.)

Weep.

Jesus wept.

Jesus wept for Mary and Martha mourned. -------------changed structure

Jesus wept while Mary and Martha mourned.

Jesus wept while Mary and Martha mourned, but Lazarus would live again.

Jesus wept.

Jesus loves me.

Jesus is God.

Jesus is loving. -----------------changed pattern

Jesus gave me a new heart.

Jesus made me his child.

Jesus made me happy.

One more thing – let’s break these sentences down just a little bit and talk about Subject and Predicate.

Can anyone tell me ----

Subject – the part of the sentence about which something is being said.

Predicate – the part of the sentence which says something about the subject.

Look at a few examples - sentences already on board. (Have students mark them – one at a time)

Every sentence has both a subject and a predicate.

Subject may be more than one word.

S P

(The fat orange cat) (loves lasagna.)

OK. So there is your overview of the entire English language! It might seem daunting now, but remember that this was just the forest. During the course of the year, we will be examining the trees. Also, remember that there are three tours. Don’t expect to understand it all the first year!

Mastery charts

- If you memorize this now, it will make the rest of the year easier

- Either use the table and copy it on a separate piece of paper, or use the blank chart on page 399 (have your mom make a copy first) and fill in the blanks.

- Either way, fill out the chart every day to achieve mastery. We’ll have a race next week to see who can fill it our first.

- Chart B isn’t on your Trivium tablet, it’s only on page 401. This has the first 28 sentence model sentences – all the possible simple sentence purposes and patterns. Again, also copy this one from the chart on page 400 every day this week.

The point of mastering these charts is that, at the end of three tours, you shouldn’t need them anymore.

Editing – If you choose to have your child edit the Bible passage provided in each lesson, use the mastery method. Don’t expect your child to correct everything that’s wrong in each passage the first week. Rather, use the Editing Rules. Teach one rule a week. The first week, only use rule #1 (capitalize the 1^st word of a sentence). Week two, use rules #1 and #2 (capitalize the 1^st word and use the appropriate end mark on each sentence). Week three, use rules #1 - #3, and so on.

Spelling – If you wish to use this guide for spelling, memorize one spelling rule a week and 3 phonograms a week. Spelling lists for each week begin on.

For homework, look at the section that says, “at home”.