Jake did a line by line revision of his introduction, completed the drafting of his conclusion, and proofread the entire paper.

Jake and I spent time revising the body paragraphs of the first draft of his paper on the play "Our Town.". We worked on improving sentence structure, transitions, and crafting a clear and effective essay. At the end of our session, Jake composed the first draft of his conclusion.

Jake worked on adding textual evidence to his literary analysis paper. He then created a quick outline for his essay. Next he added details, transitions, and explanations of his arguments within the body paragraphs.

To start, Jake and I reviewed the main themes of Our Town because it had been so long since he had read it. Next we created a list of textual evidence displaying each of the three main themes of the play. Jake then wrote a short scene narrative as a hook for his upcoming paper and wrote a first draft of his thesis statement. We finished by discussing some of the enduring lessons the play has to offer a middle school student, which will help form the basis of his persuasive paper.

Today we started with a quick grammar exercise. Next, I asked Jake to take a vocabulary diagnostic test. He did rather well. Next, we read a review of a 21st century production of Our Town and related that to textual evidence in the play. To finish, Jake continued to work on his compare and contrast writing prompt. He then started to type it up in a word document. As he did so, I prompted him to use transitions, reorder, and add more detail to his response. We will use this piece of writing as a foundation for a rough draft for his next larger writing prompt.

To start, I reviewed some irregular subject-verb agreement rules with Jake. Next, we read out of "Our Town," stopping to discuss important themes, vocabulary, and characters. Next, we focused on a section of Act 1 where the editor of the newspaper is interviewed by a panel of random people. Next, I asked Jake to imitate these interview questions but to apply them to his town of North Palm Beach. He did so thereby constructing an informational piece of writing. Next I reviewed some proofreading marks with him, and asked him to revise his own writing. Lastly, Jake made a Venn diagram comparing his town to "Our Town," in preparation for a compare and contrast writing prompt for next session.

We started our session with a quick grammar activity. Next, we discussed the Foreward to "Our Town". We discussed two themes to evaluate while reading the play and Jake wrote a summary of each with textual evidence. Next, we started reading Act 1, stopping to discuss stage directions, historical context, characters, etc.

First Jake completed a grammatical assignment where he had to revise two incorrect sentences. Next, Jake and I read The Drummer Boy of Shiloh by Ray Bradbury. We stopped frequently to synthesize the symbolic wording of the story with the author's purpose. We pointed out literary elements and made a list of vocabulary unfamiliar to Jake. At the end Jake wrote a short summary of the story using two pieces of evidence from the story. We discussed ways to revise his summary and, lastly, we covered the steps to writing a research paper and discussed which book he would like to focus on during our sessions.