Mentorship Resources

In my initial meeting with Corey, I asked him what areas of writing he thought he needed help in. Together, we were able to identify several aspects of writing I will help him with in our time together, including the proper flow of ideas, editing, constructing introductions and conclusions.

I have found a few initial online resources I will be using during our second session together:

http://www.dailyteachingtools.com/free-graphic-organizers-w.html

A website featuring a range of graphic organizer templates for various forms of writing. Since most of the templates are simply images to draw interest into purchasing the resource they come from, I will likely be modifying one of the templates for writing a persuasive essay to use with my student in our second session together. By using his existing piece of writing, the chart will be used as a means of better organizing his ideas and potentially developing new ones as we go along.

http://homeworktips.about.com/od/essaywriting/a/argument.htm

A website providing basic tips for writing an argumentative essay. Again, I will be looking through the tips and modifying the language in a way that I believe will suite my student. I don't want to overwhelm him with too much information in one session, so outlining basic tips may be best.

http://writingcenter.unc.edu/handouts/editing-and-proofreading/

A website providing tips and handouts for editing writing. This seems to be an area of particular concern for my student. My goal is to either print a resource directly from the website or modify one that my student can use in future writing and not just for this assignment.

As our second week working with students was interrupted by a field trip, I was fortunate enough to work with another student, Alan, who had a creative writing piece to share with me. He mentioned that he needed help in developing his plot, which made up the majority of our discussion during our session together. The images below are resources that I have since sent him to accentuate our discussion:

Week 3 marked the second time I would be meeting with Corey. Despite the fact that we wouldn't get to everything I had initially planned during our time working together, I decided  not to speed up the process and focus on the areas Corey needed most help in. His original piece of writing was essentially comprised of one paragraph featuring a number of key ideas that needed to be separated. For our second session together, I brought in a graphic organizer to help Corey break up his writing into logical sections:

Now that we had broken up his original text into logical sections (reason, supportive evidence), I wanted to spend our last session together helping Corey with another area he identified as needing help - his introduction. I found this great image to help Corey better understand the purpose and structure for an introduction on one of my classmates' blogs (thanks Ian!). On the same blog was the image for conclusions, which I discussed with Corey but left it up to him to use when he finally got to that part of his essay: