9-27-12 Activities and Reflection Student 1

Field Notes:

Goals: Review traffic light paragraphs, elaborate on elements of expository writing

            Introduce accordion paragraphs

            Thesis sentence if time

*Came in and immediately asked if he could work on a current event assignment after I made a comment about him bringing iPad.

        *Doing iPhone 5

        *Found an article- 5 things to know about the iPhone 5

        *Read and verbally summarized: Passbook is a new feature, asked how it worked, so we played with the new features on my iPhone 4S.

playing with the panoramic camera

*Introduced basics of accordion paragraph

      *Related it to actual accordion--asked what an accordion sounded like, so I searched on iTunes and youtube for examples

*Began 2 side outline or article

     *Used each of the 5 points as key idea and added details from article

     *"What does inferior mean?"

*Talked about other iPhones

*Began drafting paragraph at 4:18, finished 4:30

     *Stopped to talk about future current events assignments

          *Choose own topic each week, but cannot be about sports

     *Stopped to talk about evolution of computers

Reflection: 

This session was so much fun. I love how eager my student was to write today!  He came in ready and raring to go. In actuality, I had spoken with him mom about doing his Current Events assignment during our time together. We agreed this week and next to spend time reading an article, summarizing it, and then doing the outline/draft. After that, he will be responsible for doing the above steps and we will work on revising/editing.  Future steps include a strong thesis statement, transitions, and conclusions.

This student completed his draft right as our time expired. Since he worked on his own iPad, I unfortunately did not get a copy of the draft, but he wrote a strong outline. This article lent itself nicely to our method of outlining. The article had 5 new features, but he ended up only using 4. The one he left out, neither of us knew much about, so since he didn't understand it I think that decision was wise. No sense in writing about something you can't actually explain.

I think this is also a great example of learning by doing. It's one thing to read about the features of the new iPhone, but to be able to try them out really helped him understand how they worked (even though I have the "old" 4S, most of the upgrades were iOS related so I got them, too!). Once again, talking is an important theme for the day. I have a feeling when I start coding data, this will be a major finding.