Thick Description

Last Thursday, I saw each of my two writer guinea pigs students. One student in particular stood out in his/her session. We began our session by revising and editing a previously written piece using my handy ARMS and CUPS posters. Eventually I hope to separate out these two tasks, but for now simultaneously works.  S/He did a great job with CUPS. I love how s/he put a check mark by each sentence as it was proofread. That made capitals and punctuation very easy.  However, the student chose not to add, remove, move, or substitute any details, nor did s/he really read the writing to make sure capitals and punctuation were in the right places.  Maybe s/he would have been more willing to change things if we were working again on the computer, as we were in a different room that day.

I then began some direct instruction about simple subjects and predicates, which this student has been reviewing in school as well. I know because we've worked on an assignment for his class during a few minutes of a session :)  S/he really likes to take shortcuts. In the few sentences he diagrammed (I didn't feel the need to do many sentences since the student is already very familiar with the concept), he would draw one long line under the noun and verb and divide between the two words.  When I modeled, I carefully rewrote the noun and verb, adding articles under the noun.

Once we had the basics of deconstructing simple sentences down, we began creating our own simple sentences, or "Bare Bones" sentences. I again insisted on sentences with just a noun and just a verb for now.  However, some of the creations were not sentences, such as "running battery"and "iPad wearing cap."  These sentences led to discussion about the nouns needing to come before the verb.  In the case of  the first sentence, we also needed to drop the -ing in order to help make the sentence make more sense. The last sentence had a little more detail than I wanted at this point, so we finally camp up with "Cap wears." Not perfect, but s/he is also very literal, so s/he had difficulty pulling apart his/her own sentence to simplify.

Perhaps the most telling activity of the session was our game "Phrase or Sentence?" In retrospect, I probably should have introduced this activity first, just because of the difficulty s/he had. Although, because s/he had such difficulty, maybe it'd good it was last since now I can create more cards for practice. Out of a total of 14 cards, s/he misidentified 5, mostly calling phrases sentences.  However, this may not be surprising because the student likes to take so many shortcuts, s/he easily could have just looked at the capital and period all the cards had and put the longest ones in sentences.  I will definitely make more for our next session.