Cal goes out of his way to get out of doing any work. I told him last week that he would be writing about his camping weekend today, and I asked him to have three different topics to write about. He still spent 10 minutes trying to get out of it. When I finally did get him to start writing, it was with the specific goal of incorporating the different types of sentences we've been working on the last couple of weeks. Cal then wrote in exceptionally short, choppy sentences so he could say that each paragraph had 5 sentences. In short, it was a hard struggle to get him to put any effort into it, and in the end, not a lot of productive work was done.
Read through rest of notes and finish writing rough draft - roller coasters. Will had a little trouble staying focused today, but I was able to get him back on track. He really wants to do well and does a good job.
Cal did not have his computer again today, so instead of writing paragraphs (my plan), I had him work on worksheets to review the material we've covered the last couple of weeks. When he's doing the worksheets, Cal has a strong understanding of the material and rarely more than a few question. We'll see how he incorporates that into his writing next week.
Clay completed the paragraphs about his basketball tournament, and the writing was definitely far better than we he started. However, there were still a lot of glaring mistakes that he had missed when proofreading. We're working on maintaining focus on his writing WHILE he is writing, instead of rushing to get the the end.
The students engaged in Valentine's Day activities and had a birthday celebration for Judie...we did not meet today. Will really enjoyed himself - he was involved with the other students and participated in all activities.
Finish researching roller coasters - take notes. Discuss writing rough draft - putting notes in order, etc. We did finish the research today, but Will seemed a little distracted.
If Cal spent half as much energy into doing work as he does trying to get out of it, I think he could make a lot of progress. I planned to spend the first part of class having him write 3 sets of 10 sentences, but he spent so much time stalling and dragging his feet, it ended up taking the whole class. He's making good progress in learning the grammar, but we still need to work on his effort.
In class, writing has gotten much easer for Clay, and I know he understands the material we've covered. But that hasn't been translating into the paragraphs he's been writing. His first drafts are filled with run-on and incomplete sentences. So, just to be sure, I had him write sentences for me today to see where he is. I couldn't have been more pleased with the results. With the exception of a few spelling mistakes, he did very well, which proves my theory that he's not concentrating when he writes his paragraphs. We now have an agreement and I expect he'll pay better attention to his writing in the future.
Cal has done a great job with sentence structure, but before we move forward, I wanted to do a review of the different parts of speech. Today we focused on nouns (i.e. subject, direct object, indirect object, object of the preposition) and I was very pleased with Cal's effort. We got through all the material and he did 3 practice exercises with little trouble.
We continued working on how to write an introduction. Clay writes for the sole purpose to get to the end, therefor he's very direct and to the point. The concept of a general introduction is very hard for him to grasp. We'll keep working on it.
