As I mentioned in my previous post, Kevin had decided to write about one of his favourite hobbies: playing Minecraft. Today, I found out the criteria on which Kevin's assignment would be evaluated. Kevin's teacher told the class to focus on three things in their writing:
- Keeping a constant verb tense
- Descriptive adjectives
- Transitional words
I was able to help Kevin in all three areas. In the picture above, you can see some of the corrections to verb tenses that Kevin made throughout the mentoring process today ("open" changed to "opened", "is" changed to "were", "don't" changed to "didn't", etc.). It was as simple as reading the text out loud to Kevin for him to hear the errors himself and correct them without my help.
The next thing that we worked on was using descriptive adjectives. Kevin started off one of his sentences as saying that he was "confused". I praised this adjective, but then asked what else he might feel if he were to find himself in the same situation as the character in the story. He thought about it for a second, and told me he would also be interested and cautious. I also suggested that he could use the adjective curious, but he ultimately decided that his were better. As we continued writing, I kept asking Kevin to imagine himself as the character and to make sure to always explain how he would feel in the situation.
The final area which we focused on today was the use of transitional words. This area was the most conventional approach, as Kevin had been given a sheet with various transitional words divided into categories of use. As he was telling me what he wanted to happen next in his story, I tried helping him identify the direction of the plot so that he could use one or two of the words. I gave him the choice of using "nonetheless," "nevertheless," "despite," or "regardless," when his character decided to go ahead and do something in spite of him being cautious about it. Kevin openly admitted to me that he did not know what any of those terms meant, so he was relying on me for their implementation. Although I cannot be sure that he now knows how to use the correctly, I hope that he will at least begin experimenting with the terms in his own writing.
At the end of our session, I had Kevin mark down my email address so that I could look over and comment on his writing as it progressed. I will also start developing assessment tools that include the three areas that we covered in todays session. I look forward to seeing what else he comes up with and the application of what we went over today.
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