We continued working on Clay's essay from last week. He still had some glaring grammatical mistakes, so I had him proofread the essay, and he caught most of them. But he still had a problem with his final body paragraph. We talked about ways to come up with ideas, and then to fully develop them in a paragraph. Clay's default position seems to be "I don't know", which I informed him would not work. His homework is to hand me 4 perfect paragraphs on wednesday, so we can focus on how to write a conclusion.
Clay definitely had some trouble with writing the 5 paragraph essay prompt. He's come a long way in terms of his sentence structure and punctuation, but still has room for improvement. He needs to focus more on writing good sentences every time, and not rushing to get finished. That's usually when his mistakes come about. On the bright side, he usually is able to correct the mistakes once I point them out. HIs biggest challenge here was thinking of material to say, and fully developing that idea. I helped him come up with ideas about the first two body paragraphs, but the one he did on his own had three different topics. We will focus on developing ideas next week.
I gave Clay a 5 paragraph essay topic today, and he seemed to be comfortable with it. He still has a lot of trouble coming up with an introduction, but I showed him how to use the prompt to his advantage. Once he had an intro with a thesis statement, he seemed to have very little trouble with the body paragraphs. We'll see how it comes out on Friday.
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.
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.
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.
We edited Clay's paragraphs about JBP. He did a solid job writing and editing, but is still having trouble identifying a lot of the mistakes in his sentence structure. As soon as you point on out to him, he can correct it. But we need to work to get him to the point where he does it on his own. We then talked about how to write and introduction, which really plagues him. We'll continue to work on it.
Clay had some troubles with appositives, so we spent extra time reviewing that material today. He's still a little confused, but definitely improved. I then wanted him to start working on his essay for the week, but he had a lot of trouble getting started. The concept of an introduction is very difficult for him, and when I corrected him a couple of times, he got a bit stressed out. Rather than pushing it, I had him focus on the body paragraphs instead, which he'll finish for homework for Friday.
Clay has come a long way with his writing, and now we're going to start to focus on being more descriptive and concise. He picked up the concept of appositives pretty quickly, and did a great job on the worksheets. We'll work on incorporating them into his writing this week.
Clay did a solid job on his essay for the week. His paragraphs are improving, but he's still making too many simple mistakes in sentence structure. If he takes the time to really edit his work, he catches it. We'll keep working on it.
