I had Clay write two paragraphs about his day with Bobby. On the bright side, he wrote two pretty solid paragraphs much more quickly than before. Unfortunately, he went back to making some basic mistakes with his sentence structure. We then went through each sentence and talked about the multiple options of how to improve it. It was a good exercise and brought up many of the rules of grammar we've gone over. Some some reason he's really having a hard time the the articles "a" and "an". He understands the rule, but for some reason keeps making the mistake.
Clay's essay for this week was his best yet, and in my opinion, would be a passing essay on the FCAT. He did a great job with topic sentences and very agreement. His intro and conclusion were a tad weak, but that's something we can work on and fix. I was very pleased with his work this week.
Clay wrote a solid three body paragraphs on the shoe essay. He had solid topic sentences, but his paragraph development needs work. We talked about the importance of using examples to support topic sentences. We worked on filling them out, and I assigned the intro and conclusion for Friday.
We started off with Clay writing a fully developed paragraph about his weekend, with a clear topic sentence that is maintained throughout. He wrote an excellent, fully-developed paragraph, and resisted simply listing events. I then had him work on a couple of proofreading worksheets focusing on subject/verb and verb tense agreement. He did very well and only missed a couple of mistakes.
We went over Clay's five paragraph essay for the week. It was definitely an improvement from last week, but he's still having trouble keeping to one topic per paragraph, giving a clear example, and fully developing his ideas. His introduction was better, but he's still rushing to finish, rather than gradually building to his thesis statement. We'll continue to work on it.
After reading Clay's paragraphs for today, I decided to focus on editing and rewriting. His ideas were jumbled, he didn't have clear topic sentences, and his third paragraph was all over the place without any one specific topic. Even more disconcerting was the appearance of "like" in his writing, which is very new, and repeated run-on sentences. It appears, that as Clay gets more comfortable with writing, he's starting to put less effort into it. We went over two of the paragraphs, and I assigned the introduction and conclusion for Friday.
Clay continues to make mistakes with his verb tenses. Again, he does very well recognizing them on the worksheets, but has trouble with them when he writes. Today we focused on consistency, and started with Clay writing a full paragraph about his weekend in past tense. When he truly concentrates, he doesn't make the obvious mistakes. There are now direct consequences for any verb tense mistakes in the future. (multiple paragraphs practicing tense)
Clay had his essay completed today, and while it wasn't bad, there were some glaring problems. The most concerning was his introductory paragraph, which was one big run-on sentence, didn't have a topic sentence, and didn't have a thesis statement. We have gone over introductions multiple times and Clay is more than capable of doing a better job. Similarly, he failed to have a topic sentence for each of his body paragraphs as well. He did a good job of including examples to illustrate his point, but has to focus on the required elements more carefully. We talked about taking his time and focusing while writing, and not writing just to get to the end.
Clay only had two paragraphs completed and both needed a lot of work. The first paragraph had a solid topic sentence, but he failed to fully develop the idea or give examples. In the second paragraph, he just jammed three topics together and had no topic sentence or development. We talked about what he needed to improve and how he could fix them. We'll see what he hands in on Friday. As for the verb agreement, he's doing very well on the worksheets and I expect it to improve in his writing.
We started off by selecting a topic for this week, and spent a good bit of the session discussing different ideas for the body paragraphs and the thesis statement. We then reviewed and worked on verb agreement again, which is something Clay continues to have trouble with in his writing.
