Observation Day 5

I started observation day 5 by going over the writing that my student turned in from our previous session (day 4). I pointed out to him the misspellings and errors in tense application. In particular, he had trouble writing words in the past tense. I explained to him how to recognize words in the past tense and how to convert words to the past tense.

We went through his writing word by word strictly correcting words that were written in the wrong tense. As we read through I drew a box around each word that was written in the wrong tense. These will serve as vocabulary words later on. After I corrected the first couple of words, the student was able to make most of the corrections on his own from there.

After making the initial corrections to the tense of the words, we began to look for general misspellings. We also wrote these words down and added them to our growing wordlist. I didn't correct these words on the paper, because I plan on presenting the exact page that he wrote them on to him at a later date to see if he can recognize the same errors that we've pointed out today. It will help me gauge how well he is retaining the different grammatical rules that I have given to him thus far.

Lastly, we read through his writing one more time looking for run-on sentences. Again, I showed him how to recognize, and correct, the first 2 instances. The student was doing a good job of recognizing them, but from time to time I had to prompt him with a question like, "what is another way that you can say this?" or "If you put the period here(pointing to a particular spot) to end the sentence, how will you begin the new sentence that follows it?". These prompts would help him work through different hesitations that he was having when trying to correct his own work without my help.

After pointing out all of the corrections that needed to be made, I had the student re-write the portion of the story that we edited with all of the corrections that we made in place. I noticed a remarkable improvement this time, as he only omitted 1-2 of the corrections that we made to his work. We didn't have enough time to address some of the strong words that he was using in his writing, so I plan on addressing that in the next session.