Andy_TP#11

9/29/14

Ms Kim's House

Reading, spelling

PJ and I re-read a story that he is going to be tested on in school for his English reading ability. I think it's called the "AR test", but I might be hearing it wrong. He chose the story Dogzilla. Much like Godzilla, Dogzilla is summoned from the earth and terrorizes a city of mice until the can think of a way to get rid of him. PJ read and I would periodically stop him and ask a question or to summarize what was going on, which he was able to do. After the story I asked him some questions from the book to see what he could remember and we had to look back at a few pages for some information, but I think he's got the story down pretty good now. He still had trouble with one word, "Mousopolis", which isn't a real word and one that he will probably never see outside of this book, but if he's getting tested on it I thought it would be important to know how to say it properly, so I had him say "Metropolis" and then "Mousopolis" a few times. Thinking about it now, I should have written down "Metropolis" for him to see and read because that's the real word that he will see in a more normal, everyday context.

After reading I wanted to try a new activity with PJ, one that I hoped he would find fun but still educational and different from all our other sessions. I brought along the game Bananagrams which has tiles like scrabble but is played differently, but we made up our own game given our situation. It was pretty much just like Scrabble with out the points, it was a friendly game so we had all our letters facing up and after a few rounds we stopped getting new tiles and tried to use up the tiles we had left so the game would end. We traded a few letters so we could spell better, longer words and PJ impressed me several times with the words he could come up with and his placement. After each new word was placed, I would ask PJ if he knew the word and could use it in a sentence. He could pronounce all the words and knew most of them, but I had to help him with one or two words that he didn't know the meaning of. We played for an hour and a few times PJ said "this is hard" so I wasn't sure if he was liking it or not, but by the end, when we were able to use all our tiles to spell the last word and the game was over, he let out a final "That was hard" but I could tell that he was happy with the achievement of being able to learn something new and succeed at it.