Skills

Pray briefly, then review: What is heaven? ('Being with God forever.') Where is the whole story of the world heading? (Toward the fullness of God's Kingdom, when God will be all in all.) What does 'Amen' mean? ('So be it; it is true', a wholehearted 'Yes' to God.) End by saying the 'Amen' slowly and deliberately, as the seal of a whole year of faith.

This is the final grammar lesson of the year, and it is a gathering of everything you have learned. Great writers know that the difference between good and excellent is in the polishing. Today you assemble your master editing checklist, the tools of a whole year, and you will use it to perfect your capstone essay. Work in passes, one concern at a time, because the mind cannot hunt for everything at once. PASS 1, Sentence health: Any fragments, run-ons, or comma splices? Is every sentence complete and properly joined? PASS 2, Agreement: Does each verb agree with its subject, each pronoun with its antecedent? PASS 3, Modifiers: Any misplaced or dangling modifiers that confuse the meaning? PASS 4, Punctuation: Commas, semicolons, colons, and quotation marks all correct? PASS 5, Usage and word choice: Any confused homophones (their/there/they're, its/it's, affect/effect)? Any vague nominalizations to turn back into strong verbs? PASS 6, Style and register: Is the register consistent and right for the purpose? Are sentences varied in length? Is the voice active and clear? PASS 7, the final read: Read the whole piece ALOUD, your ear catches what your eye glides past. Worked example, fixing several at once: 'Their is many threads in the story of the world, the most important one being the unfolding of the faith which has effected everything.' Corrected: 'There are many threads in the story of the world, but the most important is the unfolding of the faith, which has affected everything.' (Fixed: their/there, agreement 'is/are,' the comma splice, and affect/effect.) Polish is respect, for your reader and for your own ideas.

This is the great geography capstone, the moment a whole year of map drawing comes together. Today you will draw the world from memory. Begin with a blank sheet and, without looking at any reference, sketch the seven continents in their right positions and rough shapes: North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Antarctica. Label the five oceans: the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, and Southern. Then add the major nations and features you have studied across the year, draw as many as you can recall: the Fertile Crescent and the Tigris-Euphrates, Egypt and the Nile, the Holy Land, Greece and Italy, the reach of the Roman Empire, the nations of modern Europe, China and India, the Americas, and the great oceans the explorers crossed. Mark the places where the story of the world turned: Bethlehem and Jerusalem, Rome, Constantinople, Wittenberg, Philadelphia, the beaches of Normandy, Berlin. Do not worry about perfection, this is a test of how much of the world now lives in your mind, and a celebration of the journey you have taken across it. When you have drawn all you can from memory, only then compare your map to a reference and, in a different color, gently fill in and correct what you missed. Step back and look: this whole world, which a year ago you may have known only in pieces, is now a place whose story you have walked through from beginning to end.

Write one sentence answering: 'What surprised me about how much of the world I could draw from memory?' File your world map, the capstone of a year of geography, in the front of your geography section.