Week 7 - Enlightening and Vitalizing Adverbs

How? When? Where? Why? To what extent?

These questions are the most commonly used ADVERB questions.  Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives or other adverbs.  They are powerful and fun! 

Answering these questions adds vitality to your writing. Bringing your writing to life, as the reader puts your main idea(s) into a greater context or related framework.  Adverbs bring color to the core idea or ideas your sentence is conveying.

Take the rather simple, relatively uninteresting sentence below:

Jesus loves me.

Could this sentence use a little color?  A little more life?  Be a bit more informative? Note the adverbs in italics.  Some are single-word (often -ly words), others are phrases, still others are clauses.

• How does Jesus love me? --> Jesus loves me unconditionally.
• When does Jesus love me? --> Yesterday, today, and forever, Jesus loves me.
• Where does Jesus love me? --> In the garden, Jesus loved me.
• Why does Jesus love me? --> Jesus loves me because He made me.
• To what extent does Jesus love me? --> Jesus always loves me.

Most prepositional phrases are adverbial, because they answer one of the adverb questions. These are called adverbial phrases.  More on prepositions NEXT WEEK!! So stay tuned!

Adverbial clauses contain a subordinating conjunction (refer to your conjunction chart in Appendix B/C).  The most commonly used subordinating conjunctions follow a nifty acronym:

• when
• where
• while
• as
• Since
• if
• although
• because

IEW calls these sentence openers - www.asiab sentence openers.  First year students will begin using these openers in their writing soon.  For 2nd and 3rd year students this will be review!

EEL Challenge: 2nd and 3rd year students should attempt EEL TASK 5 - the modification challenge - on this weeks compound sentences.  Using either an adverbial phrase and/or a clause.  If you add a clause, do you see the subordinating conjunction? Do you remember how to diagram a dependent clause? (hint: go to appendix A for a refresher) Parents, remember by adding dependent clause, we create a COMPLEX sentence!  Do you see the pieces coming together?

Review Time: Remember to review the imperative purpose and the implied you.  Work with students are using compound sentences and dissecting compound sentences until it becomes easy.  Your teacher sheets lead you right through the breaking down of a compound sentence into its elementary parts.  This deconstruction builds wonderful language skills that will also manifest themselves in the reverse process - stronger and clearer sentence creation.

Are you reviewing your memory work?  Add the adverb questions and subordinating conjunctions to your memory work... and review, review, review!  It makes the application and language analysis much easier and more enjoyable for the student!

Extra... Lively and captivating language... Do you have boys? Read a paragraph or two from Lord of the Rings series or CS Lewis series... or perhaps Homer or Aesop's works.  Girls? How about Hinds Feet on High Places or an except from Pride and Prejudice or the Elsie Dinsmore series.   These authors' story-telling style and commanding use of language have painted epoch stories in the hearts and minds of millions...

... perhaps one of our children will follow in their footsteps.