Meanwhile, in the writer's class.....

I have shared what the younger children are learning each week in co-op, but have not yet shared about the writing class. We are working through another IEW product, SICC-B, which stands for Student Intensive Continuation Course, level B (which, for you IEW fans, is designed to follow SWI-B - Student Writing Intensive, level B. This was a natural progression for us since we did SWI-B last year.)

For any new readers reading this, the co-op we are in is a small, 3 family group. We have 5 students 3rd grade and younger who are in a Five In a Row class, and 6 students 5th grade and above who are in the writing class. We take turns meeting in our homes. If you can't find an IEW co-op near you, but you want to be in one, form your own like we did! Just find one or two like-minded families and plan it out. We did agree on some ground rules (which I think is very important), and it is working beautifully. It also makes IEW products more affordable for us, as we split the cost three ways and co-own them!

Each week we listen to Andrew Pudewa teach us about writing on the instructional dvd, and then we either work on our outlines for the new assignment, do a bit of grammar instruction, or both. I love how IEW has so much grammar instruction built right in ~ it sticks so well when you learn about it in the context of writing! And often, we teachers will choose something we've noticed in the students' writing that is consistently incorrect or awkward, and teach to that.

Last Friday we learned about clauses and phrases. In class we throw around phrases like "who/which clause" and "because clause" pretty frequently, but many of the students were still unsure what a clause actually was. It's important to know about clauses for several reasons, among them, knowing why and how to use punctuation correctly. So to make this a bit more interactive and hopefully, fun (!) for the students, I had them wear signs describing them as either a dependent clause, an independent clause, or a phrase. Then the "clauses" and "phrases" held sentence strips in the proper order. I started with the oldest students (8th graders) being the clauses first. This allowed the younger students to hear and see the sentences being manipulated correctly before attempting it themselves.

Here we have, "If it snows tonight, we can go sledding." Both dependent and independent clauses have subjects and verbs, but an independent clause can stand alone as a complete (simple) sentence, while a dependent clause cannot. After several sentences like this, everyone could "hear" the pause after the dependent clause, as if something else was begging to be said.

Then we moved the strips around. Could we say, "We can go sledding if it snows tonight."?

Or how about this one: "Because we are out of milk, I'm going to the store." Does it mean the same thing if we say, "I'm going to the store because we are out of milk."?


If we take off the word "because", the remainder of the sentence now becomes an independent clause that can stand alone. I took some scissors and literally cut the word "because" off. Then we called more people up and had students holding individual words and mixing them all up in different ways! We talked about the value of the who/which clause and the because clause ~ that they help us combine two shorter sentences into a longer, more interesting one. We talked about how the punctuation would change if we rearranged the clauses, and took the scissors to the strips once again.


We made lots and lots of sentences and talked about what made them correct or incorrect. We identified all the subjects and verbs and sentence openers. We had fun goofing around a bit too. :-)


Here is son G's finished work from last week. It was from lessons 8-9 of SICC-B, a report on Clara Barton taken from multiple sources. The underlined and bolded words are the prescribed way of marking required elements in the report.

How One Small Thing Can Impact Your Life
by G, age 11

The youngest of seven children, Clara was small and shy. As a child, Clara gained interest in her father’s war stories. Interestingly, she nursed her brother David when he suffered a painful accident when she was eleven. Clara, who was a tomboy, proudly owned a pet turkey. Unlike most other kids her age, Clara Barton was homeschooled. One day Clara was skating when she wasn’t supposed to. She fell and injured herself and pain bolted through her like electricity. Now she knew what it was like to be hurt. When she was fifteen, she became a teacher. Isn’t that weird? Despite all this, Clara Barton was extremely shy and small.

When Clara Barton got older, she was appointed clerk of the patent office in Washington, D.C. She was deeply touched by all the wounded soldiers she noticed and wanted badly to help in some way. She became a nurse, serving often on the front lines, which was dangerous work. After learning that much of the fatal suffering was because of the scarcity of supplies on the front lines, she single handedly organized supply depots. Incredibly, Clara was appointed superintendent of nurses in 1864. All this happened because she worked in the patent office and discovered the horrible conditions of war.

One day, when the war was over, Clara Barton received a vehement letter, which was from her hometown, that read: “Miss Barton, I haven’t heard from my son in weeks. The government believes he’s missing.” Immediately Clara began to vigorously hunt for missing soldiers. After everyone else went home, Clara didn’t lose confidence. She kept searching. She found men. She succeeded. Clara Barton’s nursing and searching eventually led to the Red Cross, but that’s another story. See how one letter can impact your entire life?