Today, Rowan worked on several ACT essay prompts by brainstorming and outlining. At first, he began planning his essays at the outline phase, but this lead him to repeat ideas for the sake of filling in the 5-item list. I went over the "spider diagram" technique to get him to see all the possible subtopics BEFORE choosing his body paragraphs' topic sentences. This proved to be helpful. We also reviewed the English and Science portions.