Hunter read aloud the next section in his football book. He discussed the meaning and importance of rule game changes and how this affects different parts of the team differently (drawing inferences/cause and effect). We pulled several new vocabulary words out of this section as well.
Josh continued working on the next phase of his narrative essay, outlining the "hardest" part of working for Sega. Josh had some really creative ideas to contribute, and was able to fully verbalize the ideas that he wanted to communicate ("the lack of calculators made it really difficult to do long division problems"), but he had some trouble tracking how/when to place these ideas in his narrative chronology. Josh will say exactly what he means, but in writing will start in the middle of his thoughts rather than the beginning of the next sentence: instead of writing, "we went to the movies," Josh will say, "to the movies." This skipping over information usually happens when Josh uses articles and prepositions. To help, I had Josh stop after writing and re-read his typing. Once prompted, Josh was able to identify mistakes and go back and provide any missing information. The end product was really fantastic, and I think that Josh is very proud of how the essay is progressing.
Hunter read an extensive passage in the football book on Theories of Offensive Formations. He completed comprehension questions regarding the passage, which were a variety of higher order thinking questions. He was also required to cite the page numbers within the book where the text information was located. We pulled a few new vocabulary words from the text as well.
Dylan brought in the lyrics to his two favorite songs. We went through each and analyzed them based on what they meant to Dylan. He did a great job with each, and put a lot of thought into the meaning. I then had him write about how his personality is reflected in each of the songs, and why they had such an impact on him. I was very pleased with his work.
Today Ashley began by listening to Animals, Animals on Raz-Kids. She took the quiz and answered 9 out of the 10 comprehension questions correctly. Then we played Go Fish. This version of Go Fish had 2 syllable words instead of numbers. Ashley was very excited to win the game. We also read half of the book "Wish for a Fish" by Dr. Seuss. After we finished reading we played "-Tion Tic-Tac-Toe". The words on the board all had the suffix "-tion". We finished our session by playing short vowel Bingo. Ashley did great today. She worked hard and stayed focused the entire session!
Dylan didn't have anything to work on today, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to introduce poetry and song lyrics. We read two poems, talked about subjectivity vs objectivity, and came up with a couple of different interpretations for each. I then had Dylan pick his favorite song and we printed out and read the lyrics. We didn't have time to get into analysis, but will continue next week.
Hunter read a chapter from his football book regarding "Theories of Winning" and we noted and discussed several new vocabulary words as he read. We also read and discussed statistical tables from pro and college coaches.
Hunter read about the origins of football. This lesson was interdisciplinary as we discussed history, geography, ancient and modern cultures. He created a graphic organizer (map and diagram/timeline) to represent this information. He was introduced to several new vocabulary words, and to define them he used synonyms. Hunter also learned about citations and usage in writing.
After receiving the week's work from his English professor, Brandon spent some time considering the topic of his new argument paper. To this effect, Brandon did some preliminary research on potential topics by looking-up news articles and topics that might interest him. We went through some of the articles that we read in each of his classes and fell on the issue on raising the minimum wage, which was an interesting topic from last semester's English course. After establishing his position, Brandon wrote an introduction and thesis statement. Good session.
After reading our outline an introduction, Josh and I spent some time planning for the Phase One section of his "My First Job" paper. Earlier, Josh decided that the moral of his narrative would be: "If you work hard you can accomplish any task." With this in mind, we tracked the necessary steps or phases that Josh had to outline to reach this conclusion. At first, Josh wanted to say that there was nothing hard about the job, but I reminded him that this conflicted with the moral of the narrative. Afterwards, he decided that Phase One should outline the nature of the work environment, how he felt and what was required of him, and that Phase Two would be where he describes how work was hard, but that with diligent effort, he was able to complete the task with great success. While writing, I had to remind Josh about punctuation like commas, periods, quotations, etc. On the whole, Josh's paper is moving along smoothly.
