Observation Day 6

I used this day of observation to have my student try to write his introduction. He's already completed the body of this story, so now he knows everything that needs to be addressed, or set up, in his introduction. My estimation that writing his introduction will be easier today should prove correct. After addressing various grammatical issues in the previous session, I'm anticipating minimal errors with the writing assignment today.

I knew that I wouldn't have as much time with my student today, so I gave him about 20 minutes to write his introduction. I wanted to leave time to address whatever errors present themselves in this session. I noticed strong improvement in my student's writing today. There weren't as many errors in tense usage, but there were still some run-on sentences present.

After going through our correction process, I made it a point to talk to the student about some of the strong words that he was using in his writing. In particular, it was his use of the word "kill" on 2 occasions that raised my eyebrows. I asked him what he meant when he used that word, and he told me that it meant to beat and/or defeat the enemy in the game. We removed both instances of the word, but I needed to know if he really understood what that word meant. He didn't exactly know what it meant, but it's something that he's heard someone say before in the context of winning the game, so that's the word that he uses at times.

The student still hasn't perfected writing words in the past tense. He also showed a small penchant for writing words in the singular form when they should be in the plural form. This prompted me to put together a small list of words and have him convert them to the past tense. I put together a second set of words that he had to convert to the plural form after explaining to him how to do so.

In all, I feel that this has been one of our most productive sessions to date. My student has shown real progress when compared to where we started.