Today we began with a review of Charlotte’s Web chapter 3 through the reading of the summary Piero completed yesterday. We then read chapter 4 entitled Loneliness. We discussed the meaning of loneliness as well as words such as gloomily, budge, gosling, and cautiously. Our discussion focused primarily on recall and analysis. Piero then completed his fill-in-the blank summary review, in which he scored 7/7! Next, we reviewed the vocabulary from chapter 3 with a crossword puzzle and then a fill-in-the blank sentence completion with words from chapters 1 – 3. These sentences are written reinforcing the content of the book as well, just adding one more tool to his belt in building vocabulary and promoting understanding of an English-written novel. To reinforce our discussion of author’s purpose from yesterday, we worked through a few more examples in which Piero had to identify: persuade, inform, or entertain. He’s done very well with this concept, with a visual aid for support. Lastly, we worked on an activity focusing on drawing conclusions. Piero read several short passages and then chose the correct answer from three choices to infer the answer to the question about the events of the passage. Sharpening the skill of inference will help him to better analyze text and identify information that isn’t explicitly stated. Oral language directed activities: Today we had fun discussing the character Quicksilver for our Marvel project. We focused on several sentences in what we wrote for our project to work on pronunciation. This included several verbs with the -ed ending and we practiced not verbalizing the -ed portion of the word as “ed”. For our final activity, Piero chose to caption some funny pictures. We worked together to expand and describe. For example, in a picture of a squirrel eating corn on the cob, we also discussed that his cheeks were packed full! We wrapped up our session with some conversational English practice discussing what he had for breakfast and about returning to school.