Today, Ryan took a vocabulary quiz based on his Vocab List 2, with words from "The Utterly Perfect Murder" and "The Lottery." He struggled with the first part, which was placing words from a bank into context, specifically a paragraph I wrote about Ryan going to a car show with his friends and finding his dream car and making a plan to get a job to save money for this car in the future. I ended up allowing Ryan to look at the words for this part. He did well with his notes. Overall, he did well on the quiz. We then talked about staying on task with assignments in school and becoming a more self-governing learner. Staying organized and focused on his goals will help. We then finished reading "The Lottery," What an awesome story with so many themes. Next class we will continue our discussion of "The Lottery" and Ryan will do a writing piece.

In this session, we started with solving linear equations and then in the second half of the session we factored quadratic trinomial equations.

I worked with Ryan on factoring trinomial expressions with the leading coefficient as 1 and also with greater leading coefficients. At first, Ryan was somewhat unfamiliar with the overall approach to factoring trinomials, but I took the time to show him how the numbers and their signs in a trinomial expression dictate what numbers will occur in the factored expressions. Ryan demonstrated that he understood the process and its extension in solving quadratic equations by successfully solving some of them. There was no assignment.

In this activity, Ryan continued his work in factoring tinomials where a=1. He completed all three types of trinomial factors.

Today, Ryan and I worked on our vocabulary list. Ryan forgot his notebook again with his notes, so I changed the lesson. We began reading "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson. We read and added vocabulary that Ryan was unfamiliar with to his list. He will have a quiz on Tuesday on words from "The Utterly Perfect Murder" and "The Lottery". We analyzed and annotated as we went along. We are focusing on setting and mood, colors, characterization and behavior, and symbolism. We have not finished the story yet, and there is lots of suspense. Ryan's homework is to remember to bring in his binder and to study for his vocabulary quiz.

Ryan and I read "The Utterly Perfect Murder" by Ray Bradbury. The story is not really about murder, but about getting rid of old grudges, reflecting on one's past, and self-actualization. Bradbury's story is great for modeling word play, imagery, allusions, and symbolism. We started a new vocabulary list that we will finalize tomorrow. Ryan did a great job today with implicit reading comprehension. I may have to challenge him with more sophisticated literature! :)

In this session, Ryan learned how to multiply two binomials. Next we learned how to reverse the process called factoring. We also talked about the the importance of quadratics and how they are used.

Today, Ryan and I did some exercises and comprehension questions to check for his understanding and retention of Liam O'Flaherty's short story "The Sniper". Ryan did well. He used his inference skills and process of elimination on some of the multiple choice questions that were challenging, and he got them correct. Ryan also took a vocabulary quiz on ten words that he learned from "The Sniper" and did well. We then began an extensive review of the elements of literature so that Ryan can use these terms to do literary analysis, which is a large part of 10th, 11th and 12th grade English class. As we discussed the elements, we applied them to both "The Sniper" and to Ryan's personal experience of having to go to the doctor to get stitches, which he was concerned about. We made a pact that he would focus on his friends coming over tonight during the doctor experience. Ryan has continued to keep his binder organized. We will continue tomorrow with the elements and begin our next story, "The Utterly Perfect Murder" by Ray Bradbury.

In this session, Ryan repeated the lesson from yesterday. We did progress faster and Ryan showed great retention from yesterday. He again solved many multi-step equations using distributive properties and multiplicative properties using fractions.

In this activity, Ryan worked on solving two-step linear equations using signed numbers. When the session ended he had progressed to multi-step linear equations with distributive properties.