A Little Bit of Essentials Love

The purpose of this post it two-fold:
Fold # 1:
To share a bit of 4th and 6th grade language arts.
Fold # 2:
To see if I can work blogger from my way-cool Transformer.
The knights and I just finished our Daily Practice Sentence.  Using the Essentials program from Classical Conversations, we take a sentence through 6 analytical tasks everyday.
This is way more fun than it sounds...or than my 6th grader makes it appear. This picture actually makes me quite proud.  I survived middle school and high school with a novel on my lap under the desk.
Our finished analysis is best viewed on the big board.

This exercise included with grammar chart copywork and our current paper on what we would miss from modern times if we were whisked back into the ancient world (from the Ancient History Based Writing Lessons from Institute for Excellence in Writing) make a full morning of language arts. 
My younger knights participate off and on.  Today, one is doing handwriting and reading picture books at the table while we do language arts, and the other is running around in training pants and a Batman cape.  He added the blue writing to the bottom of Task 5 [translation: "Batman and Robin save the day."]
Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to take Batman to the potty.

Our Current IEW Assignment

For the next two weeks, my heir and spare are working on a creative writing assignment from a prompt - a Unit VII paper in IEW.  They are determining things from the modern world that they can't live without and would miss terribly if God suddenly did a Bill & Ted on them, plopping them somewhere in the ancient world.

To stimulate their brains, we watched this TED Ed about the development of civilization, all wrapped up in 4 little minutes [I don't agree with every point of the thesis, but it made for great conversation and a good jumping point for brainstorming].

Pulling information out of our own heads and organizing it into coherent thought can cause many moms and students to hit huge wall in writing.  Ugh!  It is SO much easier to look at source material and regurgitate it.  Yes, it is. And it is a great set of skills to teach [see Units 1, 2, 3, and 4 for confirmation].  Yet, why are we ultimately teaching writing to our children?  Writing is communication.  Our children need to be able to defend their faith, stand up for what is right, and protect our grandchildren!

The purpose of this structure is paramount to our ability to communicate our thoughts and beliefs to others.  When this unit is mastered, our students will be able to write on virtually any topic in any forum, whether it be blue book exams, timed essays for standardized tests, answering prompts for writing contests and scholarships, or impromptu speech preparation [you know...like the time I was sitting in Olive Garden during college and my Unitarian friend leans over and casually says to me "...so, why do you believe Jesus is God's son?"].

I highly recommend registering an account at the IEW website and listening to the archived webinars, especially the one recorded recently by Andrew Pudewa entitled "Unit 7: Cure for the Blank Page."

The key to harvesting information from the vast and fruitful plains in our own heads is to ask ourselves questions.  Then, the key to successfully writing from a prompt is to...this is a shocker, I know...ACTUALLY ANSWER THE PROMPT.

We have to be mean about this.  Pull out your inner Dragonlady.  If the paper doesn't answer the prompt, your student has to start over.  If we guide them through this process now, they will be set up for success whether they are headed to a university philosophy class or a city council meeting to speak about landowner rights.

Unit 7 promises to be a most excellent adventure.