On this day day at my middle school after first period my mentor teacher let me know that we were going to be doing RTI with a couple of 7th grade boys. RTI has to do with reading and writing intervention for students who are not on their grade level for those. Now I got to choose the topic that the two students would be writing about. I chose WWII, because they had just finished going over that and The Diary of Anne Frank in their social studies class. I knew that because they had just gone over it they would have some knowledge about the subject and be able to either and informative or narrative paragraph without to much difficulty.
After they had been writing for a few minutes one of the boys looked at me and asked when WWII had stated. So I asked him if he wanted to know when Europe had entered WWII or when we as the USA had entered because those are two different dates. I told him that Europe entered the war in 1939 and the USA entered in 1941. I then asked if they remembered why we entered the war in 1941? One of the boys said something about Mexico and them sending guns to Germany and I was very unsure as to what he was going on about until my mentor teacher said that he was refereeing to the Zimmerman Letters and I understood what he was talking about then. Then the other boy said that the USA entered WWII because of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and I told him that he was correct.
After they had finished I went through and helped my mentor teacher to correct any mistakes that the boys may have made. One mistake in particular was for getting to indent new paragraphs. even after we went through and let them know that this needed to be done when they rewrote the paragraph they still didn’t indent.