Ben practiced writing u and i in cursive. Verbs were reviewed. Ben did well identifying the verbs in given sentences. Given a series of pictures, Ben was tasked with writing a description of the pictures using time-order words. Ben researched and took notes on the American Kestrel, a bird Busch Wildlife brought with them last week. He was very interested in learning about the bird. Next session, Ben will use the notes to write a paragraph.

As Ben continued reading 'The Fantastic Mr. Fox,' we looked at the writer's language, demonstrating his perspective on these characters. We noted the personification of the tractors and the dark adjectives describing the farmers. We also noticed the language describing Mr. Fox and his family as gentle, helpless, loving characters.

Ben was quite interested in the Busch Wildlife presentation. He drew pictures of the three animals that most fascinated him. Next session, we will research the animals and write about them. Today, he confidently identified the nouns that given pronouns represented. Ben completed his written description of the planet he created last session. CUPS editing method was utilized. He worked hard and was quite pleased with his finished product.

After watching short trailers of two books, Ben chose to read 'Fantastic Mr. Fox' as his next book. He noted that this is a fantasy story, and we looked at other books written by Roald Dahl. As we began, Ben looked for evidence of Mr. Dahl's view of the characters. He found physical descriptions, character traits, and behaviors that clearly show the writer's belief that Mr. Fox is the more likable, attractive, quick-thinking, and mistreated character in this story.

I had Ben pull a reference of the Mindcraft sword that he wanted to create. We used the reference to begin designing the sword.

Ben watched a video explaining what a theme is and how to find it. We used three questions to help us find the theme of the video. As Ben completed 'The Chocolate Touch' we began to look for the story's theme. We applied the same three questions; he was able to state the theme as "Being selfish can lead to bad things." We also watched a brief clip about the origin of The Midas Touch.

Ben practiced writing the letters i and u in cursive. Focus was on slant and not lifting the pencil. Given a passage, he was tasked with circling all the pronouns. He did well arranging word cards to make complete sentences. Ben is enjoying his next writing project which involves creating a new planet. He completed prewriting activities including writing descriptive words using his senses, answering questions, drawing a picture of the planet and writing a concept web. He wrote the introductory sentence and will complete his description of his created planet next time.

Ben really enjoyed the 'Create A Critter' activity. He was asked to create and draw an animal by combining 2 or more animals. Ben then wrote a description of the animal. At the end of the session, Ben read the description to his brother to see if Hank could guess the 'critter' without seeing the picture. Hank guessed correctly and Ben was very pleased. Additionally we continue to work on noun-pronoun agreement and substitution. Ben practiced parts of speech by completing a Mad Libs passage.

Ben played a Lumosity game utilizing divided attention; he did a fantastic job. We reviewed what we read last week and continued reading 'The Chocolate Touch'. Our focus while reading was making reasonable predictions supported by textual evidence. We also practiced drawing conclusions about a character's motives for their behavior.

Today's journal prompt was, 'I can't wait until I can...'. Ben did well independently utilizing the CUPS strategy to edit his writing. Pronouns were introduced. Ben successfuly chose the correct pronoun for given nouns. He enjoyed taking turns in creating a story with me. Additionally, we used the whiteboard to generate describing words for different nouns.