Atticus has significantly developed his essay writing skills this year. Today, he worked on our final essay of the year discussing themes in a "A Long Walk to Water". After I outlined on the board the elements of the introductory paragraph , Atticus drafted a first paragraph that contained a thesis statement and introduced the characters and the setting. Next, we discussed how to tie the second paragraph to the thesis and reviewed our outline to cull textual examples. As Atticus drafted a second paragraph ,I provided instruction on using connecting words such as "likewise, and furthermore" and on avoiding sentence construction relying on the intransitive verb"to be." Homework-complete drafting second paragraph.