Matt TP #8

For our fourth session, Jeffrey and I took a break from reading to work on his writing skills. His father let me know that Jeffrey was having trouble with composition, particularly with writing complex sentences. For example, when asked to write a sentence with the word 'ball,' Jeffrey  wrote 'He kicked the ball,' but when asked to give more detail, he had difficulty expanding it to something like 'He kicked the ball (and it flew very far).' Furthermore, Jeffrey needed some reinforcement of basic punctuation and capitalization rules.

Before setting to work on complex sentences, I first wanted to check Jeffrey's fundamentals (spelling, handwriting, knowledge of alphabet, etc.) So I modeled the sentence 'Jeffrey is the coolest,' and asked him to write something similar about himself (I believe he wrote 'Jeffrey is a ninja.'). Seeing that the basics were in order, I asked him to write about what he would do later that day. I figured daily routine would provide a nice basis for putting  together syntactically complex but still simple sentences. With just a little guidance from me, Jeffrey wrote: "Today I will go to church, and there I will pray." Jeffrey then wanted to draw me a picture of his church, and I agreed on the condition that he write a sentence about it after. What Jeffrey actually drew was a little weird: a rather stern looking God, with a cruciform body, wearing a robe similarly emblazoned with a cross. He asked me to draw Jesus and I uncomfortably obliged him with a bearded stick figure that looked more like a malnourished homeless guy than the son of God. Trying to steer away from religious caricature, I asked Jeffrey what his favorite food is. Apparently, it is "zombies because they are made out of ice cream." Hilarious. After we regained our composure we wrote this out, and Jeffrey again wanted to draw a sketch. Seeing that we were spending too much time drawing,  I allowed Jeffrey to draw the zombie on the condition that this time he write me an entire story about it.  I struck gold with this one. This activity really captured Jeffrey's imagination. We ended up making a mini-storybook entitled 'The Zombie' (brilliant in its simplicity) with a cover and illustrations and everything. Needless to say this was an instant horror masterpiece, in the tradition of King or Lovecraft. Anyway it was really fun, Jeffrey wrote a lot and well, and we got to read the story to his dad when we finished (he was very amused).

After seeing how energetically Jeffrey works when his imagination is sparked, I think I'll plan some more activities that use English in a creative and fun way.