Today I gave Will an introduction to the parts of speech, starting with nouns and pronouns. Will was able to identify the most basic part of speech (nouns) as well as their intricately connected cousins, pronouns. We went through the subjective pronouns (I, you, we he/she, we, they) and three of their most popular uses. Will didn't seem to have any problems understanding the lesson, but I will test him on his retention tomorrow. The goal is to prepare Will for SAT/ACT grammar and to strengthen his writing. Next, Will wrote a small prompt addressing Alan Moore's idea that man believes that he is able to control nature. After a few moments of this, I could see Will was struggling, so I had him read what he wrote. Will was a bit embarrassed, but I told him that informal writing assignments like this are designed to build critical thinking skills. This seemed to relax him a bit, and we discussed his response, which didn't exactly address the prompt, but which was still insightful and creative.