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The student and I met today to go over the feedback on her introduction, thesis statement, and body paragraph assignment. Overall, the feedback was good, but she was struggling to figure out in what direction she should take her argument. After some conversation, I realized she was being held up by the original outline we had crafted, so I asked her to talk me through her paper, pretending the outline didn't exist. As she talked, we rearranged the components into a new order to match the flow of her conversation. She was pleased with the new format. Working with that, we plugged in all of her supporting scholars and thought about how to balance the paper with close readings and biographical information on the author. She is in a good spot for the peer review workshop tomorrow, and at our next meeting we will do heavy work on a full draft of the research paper so that we can do minor touch-ups before it is due.

During this session, we focused mainly on the spelling of the student's vocabulary words from his textbook.

The student and I covered a lot of English and Languages Arts from her 7th grade curriculum. We first started off with grammar exercises from class. She had a few small errors but identified the problems correctly after some prompting. She can improve in this area by reading more and developing a stronger familiarity with grammar. Next, we covered reading exercises. She would read a passage then answer multiple choice questions. I helped her use choice elimination to find the correct answer. Vocabulary exercises were also covered (also from class). She had 8 sentences with 24 possible words. She and I first identified the part of speech needed from the sentence and automatically eliminated words based on part of speech. Then, the context of the sentence allowed her to find the correct answer. The process of elimination was successful. The final exercise covered was verb usage and identification. Her teacher had an exercise using a popular song, and she found the correct verbs, direct objects, and usage.

We continued working on expository writing. He used his planning grid to organize his thoughts, and worked on using descriptive words during his planning process. He will continue to work on his sentence structure and using higher level vocabulary in his writing. His attitude was positive and he was receptive to all feedback. With practice, his sentence structure and use of higher vocabulary will improve.

The student did a great job today. We worked on reviewing multiplication facts and tested his speed and fluency in reciting his facts. He has made great progress in being able to quickly recall his multiplication facts. He needs to continue to work on his 8's and 9's facts. We also worked on reviewing the different parts of a story using the CSPACE method. The student made flash cards to keep so he can review them on his own. I also noticed that he was having some hesitancy with reading numbers larger than 1,000, so we reviewed how to read numbers in the ten and hundred thousands' places.

Tonight's session began with working on some reading comprehension homework from the student's class. The story was about an invention for helping clean dirty water so people in Ghana could have clean drinking water. The student had read the story and we worked on the multiple choice answers for a number of questions. On several questions I had to prompt the student to return to the story to find the answer since he was simply guessing on some answers. After answering the comprehension part he had a page that was a crossword puzzle and we worked on putting the correct term within the sentence, again based upon the story he had read. We also went over the definitions of many of the words he did not know. The next portion of our session was on grammar, and we worked on verbs. We first reviewed what nouns were but then went over what the definition of a verb was. A word that tells the action in a sentence. We worked on a verb worksheet, reading sentences and having the student point out the verb or action being taken. The student was given an additional worksheet on verbs to work on at home. Finally we worked on the student's writing and trying to add descriptions and length to what he was writing. I had brought several pictures I took out of magazines and asked which picture interested Evan the most. He chose a picture of a polar bear on the edge of a body of water. Before he wrote, I asked the student to verbally describe what he saw in the picture, asking follow up questions to get more detailed information. The student then wrote what he said he saw and he managed to write a short paragraph, several sentences, of what he saw in the picture. The student is still working on saying words properly, sounding out the sounds. This he does when we slow down and I ask him to sound out the syllables one at a time and then put them together. After a few tries he can generally succeed. This is a continuing issue that we work on at every session. And once he sees a word and has to pronounce it several times he can often remember what it is. Every session we work on phonics and will continue to do so.