I had Clay start this weeks writing assignment about his basketball tournament last weekend. He had a pretty solid introduction, but when I read it, I noticed he didn't use any of the basic sentence structure we've worked on. When I asked him about it, he responded "I forgot". He was able to immediately recognize his mistakes and correct them, but he has to learn to use the grammar he's learned all the time. On the bright side, he had three paragraphs finished by the end of the class. He's doing much better at generating ideas, fully developing them, and then putting them into words.
We started covering possessive nouns today. Clay picked up on it very quickly and had very little problems with the worksheets. I will incorporate that into his writing assignment for the week.
Clay's homework was to have 3 completed and edited paragraphs for class. Not only did he do it, but this is probably his best writing yet! His sentence structure was solid, he had no verb tense issues, it was clear and on topic. We spent the class going over it and fine-tuning it, but today he showed real progress!!
Clay had written a paragraph for his Mom, so we started by having him re-write it and correct his mistakes. He did much better with this than last week. We then went through it sentence by sentence and identified where he could have improved and why. For his homework, he has to write two more paragraphs, and have them edited and typed by friday.
final edit of BCS paper
verb tense agreement worksheets
Clay did a pretty solid job with the BCS paper. He's recognizing a lot of his mistakes, but still has problems with the structure of his sentences. He needs to work on being more concise and keeping things simple. We then worked on verb tense agreement worksheets, which he had very little trouble with once he got the hang of it.
Clay did a pretty good job revising the first paragraph of the BCS paper, but seemed to have a lot of trouble with splitting the second one into two fully developed paragraphs. We went through it step by step, and I talked about the importance of staying focused on the rules while writing. His homework is to write a conclusion, which needs to be done by Friday.
I've noticed that one of Clay's biggest problems is with verb agreement. He constantly changes tense, and has trouble with subject/verb agreement. We went over his BCS Bowl paragraphs, and edited the introductory paragraph with complete sentences, and proper verb tense. His homework is to edit the rest of it. We then did a couple of worksheets on subject/verb agreement. It took him a while, but he got the hang of it.
paragraphs about BCS game
-introduction/how to start
-body paragraphs
Clay is definitely a little rusty after the break. He kind of abandoned sentence structure for the introduction, which I immediately had him address. His biggest trouble at this point is getting started. He has a lot of trouble thinking of what to say, but once he does, he focuses on the information more than how he's writing. From now on, he's going to write a paragraph summary of each chapter he reads, on top of working on the 5 paragraph essay format.
We finished up Clay's paper today. We did the proofreading, cleaned it up and added some information to round it out. I'm very pleased with Clay's effort on this paper. He's followed instructions very well, did all assignments that I asked, and really tried to write a solid paper. I'm very pleased with his effort and progress.
