10-18-12 Activities and Reflection Student 1

Field Notes:
Goals: Thesis Statement
           Transitions
           "Blue to Jazz it up"
*No school today (Fall Break)
*Reading To Kill a Mockingbird
     *Likes it so far.
     *Asked lots of questions about main characters and what happens. Favorites are Scout and Atticus
          *Likes Atticus' name and likes how much of a tomboy Scout is. Didn't realize Scout was a girl at first.
*Introduced Occasion/Position Statements as Thesis Statements.
     *Described 13 ways to write a thesis statement
          *Most familiar with #7: lists, and #2: Power numbers.
               *Talked about the "There are" traps, especially for Power numbers statements. Avoid using "There are __(Number)___..." Discussed ways to avoid.
*Discussed transitions
     *Read several sample paragraphs and circled the transitions. Some were obvious and others were not.
     *Gave handout to take home with common transitions
*Talked about teachers and being taught writing
     *Didn't like one teacher because she was "boring and did old school handouts and worksheets."
     *Has several younger teachers now and thinks they're easier to relate to.  Also likes how I'm teaching writing--"It's more interesting." Didn't really press for specifics into what made it more interesting.

Reflections:
He likes it. He really likes it!  I'm glad my student is enjoying our time together. For our first session, I was giving a brief overview for what we'd be doing and said we were going to be working on writing. His response was "But I like writing." I said that was great, but even professional writers work to make theirs better, so that's what we would focus on.

We discussed 13 ways to create a thesis (or topic) statement. I'll work on getting a copy of the list our academic therapist gave me posted here. He was most familiar with Number Statements and Lists. Lists are what he's most familiar with from writing five paragraph essays. We talked about the trap of using "There are..." with number statements, so switch it around to use specific nouns and verbs. Instead of "There are four important procedures for new recruits." say, "The new recruits learned four important procedures." He seemed to understand how the latter was a stronger statement. Now I have to work on that myself!

We also worked on transitions. This is something I've noticed often lacks from his writing. He will go from one key point to the next without much warning. He read two similar paragraphs with different transitions and asked him to mark what the thought the transitions were. He easily got the first, next, and finally. We needed to talk through several less obvious ones--"first of all" was easy while "They are also playful" was trickier, simply because it wasn't the first word of the sentence.  Either way works and using a variety is always a good idea.