For this lesson, we were finishing our article and starting to write the body paragraphs of our essay. Since we did not finish our article in the previous lesson because it is really complex, so I got to keep my group and work with them again! I was really excited because I have really enjoyed working with them and they were excited to finish up reading with me. For the other groups, they all were mixed up, so I was the only one with the same group. I really liked getting to work with them again, since I was able to gauge their understanding of the article of the previous lesson, and could support them in their writing during this lesson. I gave them the graphic organizer, and they got right to working on planning their writing. One student, though, struggled to get started, and was just looking at his paper. To get him going, I worked with him by giving him prompts like "If you were to tell me about what you just read, what would you say?". This worked really well for him to be able to tell me what he read, and then could write down what he told me. Before letting them write, I also modeled a think aloud where I said "When I think about writing my body paragraphs, I think about what would be the most important points to tell someone who has not read the article. This helps me to think about the most important points I want to write about when starting my paper.". I would go around and prompt each student with that statement, but especially with the student who was struggling, because he was really good at telling me what he read, but struggled to get his thoughts down on paper. I then took out my own paper, and modeled how he could organize his writing when using the organizer. This helped him to visually see the expectations, and he was able to get it done by the end of the lesson! Everyone was cleared to start typing their body paragraphs when we got to the next lesson.
