We continued reading the Edgar Allen Poe short story today. Cal is doing a great job on the reading, but really needs to work on identifying difficult vocabulary words when he encounters them. He's a bright kid, and can often guess a meaning by it's context, but in the long run that can hurt him. We'll start putting together a vocabulary plan next week.
We started reading a new short story today. We spent some time talking about Edgar Allen Poe (history/style of writing/other famous stories) and then started reading the story. Cal had a little trouble with the vocabulary, but did a good job of stopping to ask what words meant. We didn't have a full session to work with so we did not get it finished.
Using the short story we read last week, today we worked on writing analytical/persuasive paragraphs. I asked Cal to think of three points he wanted to make about the story, and then we went through the process of crafting paragraphs using specific examples from the story. He had a tendency to re-tell the story but should improve in time.
Cal was a half hour late, so we didn't really have time to work on what I had planned. Instead, we did a grammar review, and I was EXTREMELY pleased with the results. Cal has remembered most of the the material we covered in the beginning, and did an excellent job with proofreading and spotting mistakes. Great work!
Cal finished the short story I gave him to read and did a very good job with it. He paid attention to the details, and had some very strong opinions about the message of the story. We had a great conversation about it, and then I had him start working on analytical paragraphs using specific examples from the text. We went over topic sentences again and how to develop ideas. Great effort today!
Cal was about 15 minutes late for our session, and he had not read the short story I had asked him to read for class. I had a whole exercise planned out using the text, so instead we just read it in class.
Today we continued discussing descriptive writing and focused on the use of analogies in writing. We basically stuck to metaphors and similes, but spent the day coming up with different ways to describe feelings. Cal was actually really into it and came up with some really good stuff. I was very pleased with his effort.
Cal was a half hour late today and had his testing after class, so he wasn't receptive to working on grammar. Instead, we talked about/worked on writing descriptive sentences and paragraphs. I gave him a short story with great descriptive passages. We read a few and then talked about what makes a good description. We went over analogies, similes, and metaphors. I think Cal got a lot out of it.
