Thanksgiving Lesson

Kyle wrote a blog about Thanksgiving. I set forth three teaching points for the blog: to progress from general to specific, to use a colon for a series, and to understand the difference a past and present tense in a paragraph. I also ended up teaching him how to use time transitions. We started with three questions

1. What is Thanksgiving?
   
2. What did we do for Thanksgiving this year? What did we eat?
   
3. What are you thankful for?

Past and Present
Questions 1 and 3 require him to use present tense, while question 2 requires him to use past tense. He wrote the paragraph in the proper tense without any further guidance. I just pointed out after he wrote the entry the uses of the two tenses.

Colons
The entry required him to list things. I showed him how to use a colon with a series. He writes like he talks, so he originally wrote: We had three pies, cherry, sweet potato, and lemon. I showed him how to use a colon in place of the initial coma. I likes learning new things and wanted to incorporate the colon for his list of things he is thankful for.

General to Specific
The questions guide him to a general to specific construction. He started with a general statement about Thanksgiving. Then, he described what we as a family do for Thanksgiving. This was exactly what I wanted him to do and he did it with no guidance. Then, he jumped to "I ate.." This was not what I wanted. I guided him with questions about the whole group: What did we eat? He did not want to write everything we ate, so he came up with "a lot of food." This was perfect and allowed him to transition from the general (we/food) to the specific (I/turkey).

Time Transitions
I used this as a time to teach him time transitions. I guided him to the transitions with when questions like: When was Thanksgiving? He used responses (yesterday, after we ate) to progress through the paragraph.

Technology
Then came the fun part. We did not take pictures for Thanksgiving, so we had to improvise. We searched Google Images for a "thanksgiving dinner." He choose an image and we went about the task of personalizing it. We used Adobe Fireworks (Paint.net is a freeware version) to edit the image. First, we had to find a picture with a close up of Kyle's face. Next, we had to cut out his face by removing the background. Then, we had to merge the images. These steps required my help. Once his head was on the image, Kyle could make adjustments to the new merged image. He used the select tool and paint bucket to change the color of the clothes and to change the peas into cranberries.

This project took longer than expected, but in the end we was satisfied. I rewarded him by buying him his own domain name: www.kylegonzales.com.