Ashley began her session by playing a word building game called Bananagrams. The object of the game is to build as many words as possible. Ashley and I worked on different phonics rules to help her successfully build words. She was very receptive to learning some helpful phonics "tricks" to remember how different letters sound when put together. After playing Bananagrams, Ashley and I played Cause and Effect Alpine Adventure. The object of the game is to travel around the board (an alpine ski resort) answering reading comprehension cause and effect questions. Ashley and I reviewed what the cause and effect relationship is and came up with several examples of it in "real life" situations. She did well decoding unfamiliar words when reading the passages and was able to solve many of the cause and effect relationships.
Josh and I read "Climbing the Golden Arches," in the Norton Sampler. Afterwards, I worked with Josh on essay organization, reminding him of how essays have an introduction, thesis statement, body and conclusion. Once we established these elements, I gave Josh the prompt: "Write a letter of application to your ideal job. Explain your qualifications, your career goals, and how you expect to achieve them.
Going along with our theme of satire and parody, Josh and I read the funny article "No Wonder They Call me a Bi***h," which was about how a food critic decided to apply her knowledge to dog food; hence the title. Josh seemed to really enjoy the work, commenting on the descriptive nature of the author's experience in writing and how he "would never have done that!" At the end, I had Josh consider the "bigger message" that this satire was communicating. At first, Josh seemed to think only superficially about the issue "The author doesn't really like dog food," but with some consideration he was able to generalize the issue: "the dog food industry doesn't really care about what it feeds pets." This was a huge step for Josh, and I am excited to see his critical thinking skills grow from this experience.
I introduced the topic of critical thinking to Josh this evening, defining inductive and deductive reasoning for him. While Josh had some trouble with this at first, I gave him the example of juxtaposing Dr. Seuss and Shakespeare to demonstrate how, based on inductive reasoning, we can use certain instances to draw specific conclusions. Here, the conclusion that Josh came to was that by comparing Dr. Seuss and Shakespeare, Epic Rap Battles pointed to a skewed paradigm in our society where Dr. Seuss can be just as valued as Shakespeare in literature.
Dylan scored very well on his test on The Giver. We spent the session going back over the book and discussing some of the major themes. We had a big conversation about the ending and the possible interpretations. Dylan hadn't thought about it much and was really into the idea that they died. We then started working on his new book, and talked about understanding other cultures and the importance of that toward diversity.
Ashley began her session playing a version of Bingo called Wingo (word bingo.) The game board is set up so that each player must create words from word chunks across a row to get Wingo. During the game we worked on phonics rules and sounds. Ashley practiced sounding out both real and nonsense words and had to determine which they were. After Wingo, we played a reading comprehension game called, Jungle Safari Main Idea. The players travel around on a safari reading comprehension passages and determining the main idea. While AShley was reading her cards, we worked on decoding strategies and looking for the clues within the text to help answer the question correctly. Ashley seemed to enjoy the game! She ended the session by working on a phonics folder that I created for her. Ashley completed several pages of phonics to build her skills.
Dylan had some trouble on his Call of the Wild test (which we never got the chance to discuss), so we went over the test and talked about different strategies he can use to help him better remember the details. He's going to start taking chapter notes on a separate piece of paper after reading each chapter, and will make flash cards whenever he gets a character list. We then went through the test, which was very difficult by the way. We talked about developing his answers more fully on his study guides, and then using them later.
Ashley began her session by playing a reading comprehension game called Riddle Master. The game's players are trapped in the bottom of a cave and must move through the underground tunnels by answering reading comprehension questions (focusing specifically on inferencing skills) in order to reach the top. Ashley did extremely well reading the passages and finding the clues within the text to help her answer the questions. After playing Riddle Master, Ashley and I played word dominoes. The dominoes have word chunks on them and each player must build a word by putting them together. Ashley and I focused on phonics rules to help sound out the different words and then determined whether or not they were real words or nonsense words. Ashley had some difficulty with the vowel sounds and whether or not they should be long or short. This is a concept that we will continue to practice in order to help her decode with more ease.
