Kayla TS #2

Date/Time: September 2, 2016/10:40 am - 11:40 am
Location: Tutee's Home
Topic/Skill: Writing Skill/5th Grade
Feedback provided to tutee:


I just told PJ what we were going to do next session: write an opinion essay.  I also mentioned that he needs to focus during our sessions.

Lesson(s) about tutoring and/or the tutee you learned:


Before coming to the session, I looked up Florida's 5th grade standards for writing, and one of them focused on opinion essay writing.  I started today's lesson with a warm-up question: what is an opinion?  He was able to answer this easily, but we still went through the Opinion vs. Fact PowerPoint.  The next thing we did was create an 'Opinion Writing Checklist'.  It's a checklist of all the things that should be included in an opinion essay.  PJ had a hard time trying to understand what I wanted him to do, so I tried to explain it with an example.  However, we ended up creating one together.  We compared our checklist to a checklist online.  During the review, he had a hard time staying focus and engaging with me and the lesson.  We then read a sample essay, and I had him point out the different points of the essay: introduction, body paragraphs, conclusion, supporting details, etc.  I then had him choose something he liked (traveling), and I helped him brainstorm an outline for his essay.  I plan for him to write his opinion essay next session for about 30 to 40 minutes, and then review the essay with him.


I am having trouble balancing teaching information and him actually practicing writing.  I am doing too much teaching and not enough of him writing.  So next lesson he's going to jump right into the writing after I explain the directions. I do hope that he doesn't waste a lot of time going over the small, fine, minute details of the assignment and just understand the big picture.  I do think he got some type of understanding out of this lesson because he did ask questions.  We'll see what happens next session. :)