Today we began our session by reading through the chapter summaries for chapters 1- 3 of our new novel, Fantastic Mr. Fox. We then moved on to chapters 4 – 6 of our novel. Piero recalled pronunciation of the word “Mrs.” from our discussion yesterday! He self-corrected the first time he read it and then continued using it correctly throughout. We are working on slowing pace and reading more fluently. He is running quite a few words together. I will really be addressing this more intently moving forward. In our shared reading, modeling of pace, inflection, and prosody are provided at an almost exaggerated level. As we read we discussed vocabulary such as glum, dozed, sobbed, and fright. Piero completed sentences using a word bank, after each chapter to help review the information read. The level of this novel is simpler than our previous study, allowing for more verbal exchange and discussion of the content. Next, we revisited some vocabulary of verbs that we learned last week and practiced using in crossword puzzles this week. Piero inserted these words into sentences using context clues. He scored 8/12 and we used the strategy of skipping the ones he didn’t know to utilize a smaller word bank to help on the trickiest ones. This helped a bit and we will continue to reinforce integration of these words into his lexicon. Additionally, we worked again with cause and effect. Piero read a passage and we worked together to answer three questions related to “what was the cause / effect of” specific events in the story. Lastly, we worked on the figurative language concept of personification, in which we give nonhuman objects the qualities of humans. I was very impressed in Piero’s engagement in this activity. A lot of support and two-choice examples were provided in promoting understanding of this more abstract topic. We worked through 7 examples identifying the items taking on personification and the intention of the act. I then asked Piero if our new book is using personification. He initially said, “no”, but we discussed how we’ve never seen two foxes talking and identified this as personification. Oral language directed activities: We worked together to share information about the character Vision in our Marvel project. We then moved on to Piero’s Revolution. I preempted our discussion with reminders of English building strategies such as reducing redundancy with word repetition, to use pronouns, to use the appropriate pronoun, use verb tense, and reduce use of “a”. Piero did a nice job and gave me information about the secret island where his monsters live. We then evaluated his work for adjustments, particularly focusing on ways to incorporate and use the pronoun “it”.