Thursday, February 11th

My university supervisor visited during my first hour today. He got to watch the class and I complete the weekly "Positive Peer Relations" activity, a "Reading Practice Quiz" activity, and then for the rest of the hour the students and I worked on writing the rough drafts of our Persuasive Essays. 

I tried a tactic today, though not while my supervisor was here, to create small work groups within the classroom. I rallied all of the students who were behind on finishing their essay outlines and had them cluster their desks together. We all worked together, at relatively the same pace, to finish the outlines. This seemed to prove pretty effective with most of the kids. While we were working on outlines I took the time to check in on other students in order to be sure that they were working forward with their rough drafts and to see if they needed any help. It all ran relatively smoothly, outside of the fact that we seemed to run out of time as usual. We're making progress.