Logan_TP#3

J Logan Matthews
TP#3
Sep 1, 2014 (5:30-6:30)
Tutee's Residence

My tutee for this evening was Claire, a 6 year old Korean-English bilingual girl in the first grade. Her mother had informed me that she had been living in the U.S. for three years and she was already one reading level ahead of the first grade. In my assessment she was a very well-behaved student and seemed to have an excellent attention span for her age.

Her mother, Jihei, began the session by showing me some errors on her school work and I elicited and provided correction for one of them as a demonstration. I later began the session by asking about her day, specifically her special trip to Wakullah Springs and whether she swam or waded (providing visual definition for this) and how many people she went with. After this, Claire appeared to be in anticipation to begin reading a selection of level 2 books she had picked out from the library. I let her proceed reading and whenever there was a long pause I provided support in sounding out the words. Some of the words needed explanation and I went in detail by drawing pictures in my sketchbook to relate them to simpler vocabulary. 

For the hour-long lesson we proceeded in a similar fashion, finishing one book and beginning another. Along the way I stopped to test her reading comprehension and provided definition. In the second book we spent a lot of time breaking down a heavily punctuated sentence similar to this "In the night, Waynashey baboons, like Tino, snuggle together." Claire had a hard time identifying  separation in subjects as well as the usage of like. I began by extending the phrases into independent clauses as I explained how it was used as shorthand for descriptions relating to questions like, "Which baboons?" and "When do they snuggle?" Still, she seemed to not comprehend the sentence entirely but we were making progress until our time was already up.

Over email, Jihei had given me a breakdown of how she would spend an hour on English with Claire and I think that my natural tendency to digress got the better of me and we ended up spending the whole time on reading punctuation, comprehension, and pronunciation. Next time, Claire's mother wants us to work on Claire's weaker areas in spelling and sentence construction, judging from the correction's on her 1st grade worksheet. I will prepare some small cards for writing sentence fragments on and play a word soup game for the sentences Claire appears to need help with. I also have some ideas for playing card games if she grows tired of that activity. Next time I need to suppress my desire to give a very thorough explanation of a phrase or situation during one on one and opt for simple relational definitions to save time. I will also set some alarms on my phone to match the lesson breakdown in the email.