Gabe - TS #8

     For this lesson, I decided to work on Masoud's writing skills. Throughout our lessons, I've noticed that he consistently struggles with many aspects of writing such as spelling, handwriting, knowing which letter is which, and writing complete sentences. I think for most of our remaining sessions, I'm going to incorporate more writing to help him better develop his writing skills. I told him to write me a paragraph about whatever he felt like. He wanted more clarification, so I told him he could write about something that happened recently. He decided to write about what he did on the weekend. The first thing I noticed is that, while he technically wrote in complete sentences (i.e. they had a subject, a verb and an object), his sentences were quite short and choppy. I pointed this out to him and showed him how he could connect some of these sentences to form larger, more complete ones that sound more natural. 

    We ran into a conundrum when I corrected his use of the word "other" to "another" and he asked "why?" I couldn't come up with an answer off the top of my head, so I asked Aziz, who Masoud had brought along, if he could explain it better. He tried to explain it in Arabic but Masoud still didn't get it, so I said we should just move on. I'll be sure to look this up myself and then create a mini-lesson around it for next time. One of the things he mentioned in his paragraph was that he and his friends had seen an "interesting" movie, so I asked him to write another paragraph, explaining what the movie was and why he thought it was interesting. This paragraph ended up being a little better developed, had less choppy sentences overall, but still contained plenty of punctuation and spelling errors. I feel like this was definitely a helpful lesson and I will continue helping Masoud develop his writing skills throughout our next meetings.

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