As the school year winds down, Jackson is revisiting the grammar we learned in the beginning of the year. He is completing exercises to refresh his memory on parts of speech and sentence structure.

Today we watched a move with Bobby and practiced communication skills with quick intro conversation. Also, we played a game on past vocabulary which helped us refresh past material.

Today we began with typing practice. Jackson was able to increase his typing speed by 7wpm while keeping the accuracy at 99%. Next, we discussed the difference between hardware and software. We took an interactive tour of all the hardware in a computer. We discussed RAM as the 'brain' of the computer that determines how much capacity a computer has to run its software. Next, I showed Jackson how to use Google Docs, and how to share a document. I asked him to come up with an idea for an announcement or message he would want to design and send. He found an image, and I introduced him to an online photo editing program. Then I took him through all the different photo measures that can be changed to edit a photo for different purposes. Next, I showed him how to add text to the photo.

Jackson edited five paragraphs to correct errors in punctuation, spelling, word usage, and grammar. He is consistently improving his proofreading skills and his ability to recognize, for example, missing commas or misplaced apostrophes.

We practiced balancing different levels of chemical equations.

Simplifying radical expressions, Pythagorean Theorem, and operations with radical expressions (addition and subtraction).

Initially, we had several Skype connection problems. Once we were able to communicate, we returned to Stephen King's book, "On Writing." We concentrated on discussing King's ideas about childhood imagination and how that influenced the creativity of writing fiction. We also discussed a few American creative writers of fiction, especially James Patterson of Palm Beach, who addressed local middle and high school students about reading and writing recently.

Jackson began a unit on poetry. I introduced him to a process to read and analyze a poem, by walking through it myself with a poem called, "The Rider." We then worked together to analyze a poem called, "Thumbprint."

Jackson brainstormed ideas about the stock market that he already comprehends. Jackson read a brief description about the stock market on the internet. We orally discussed the basics of the stock market. Jackson watched a brain pop video on the stock market. Jackson completed a ten question quiz on the stock market after the brain pop video. Jackson watched a more detailed video on the Stock Market on youtube.

Jackson responded to four questions about the differences between the movie, Charly, and the book, Flowers for Algernon. In the last question, he described how he would change the movie to delete scenes he felt didn't add to the story and include scenes from the book he felt were missing from the movie.