Marissa_TP#8

Marissa M.
Tutoring Blog #8
9/29/14

Today I had another tutoring session with Jairo.  I was not able to meet with him last week, as he was in an accident and did not feel well on the days I was available.  However, I was amazed at how much he has improved - mostly on his own - during the past week.  He was much more confident in his speaking abilities this week and able to say more phrases.  While at home, Jairo took the opportunity to write several key phrases that he could use in conversations.  He told me that he would then practice them and I could see where he had noted the Spanish meaning as well in case he needed a reminder of what the phrase meant. 

For the first part of our session we spent about 10 minutes discussing how he was feeling and our weekend.  He told me that this weekend was his wife's birthday and so they went to the park.  When the returned he and his son cooked her dinner and a cake to celebrate.  I told him about my FSU party on Saturday and my lazy Sunday doing chores and catching up.

After chatting for a while, we focused on his homework.  He had a few specific questions about singular and plural nouns and when to use each.  Specifically he had worksheet that showed all singular nouns for which you just added an "s" to the end, but I told him that some you added "es" and others you had to drop the y and add "ies" to the ending.  He then wanted to find a few examples and so we did.  We looked at country/countries, family/families, city/cities, and similar words.

Jairo had quite a bit of homework that his instructor had given him, particularly since he had missed a few days and was catching up.  She asked that I specifically work on that with him.  He was still looking at his medical book (the one we reviewed two weeks ago) for one assignment.  That one was fairly quick, but I noticed that he had been introduced to money and numbers.  I've not yet had to explain this to students so I was honestly a little nervous about practicing, but it went fine.  I taught him how to compare prices to see if something was greater or not.  We looked at comma placement in thousands and the period placement to indicate cents.  Once I explained how to read numbers he did quite well!  Some problem at first with the 0 placed in thousands (ex: 31,089), but that we quickly corrected.  With this lesson he asked me how you would write out entire numbers for entering in a checkbook.  The example we had was $1,135.50.  I showed him the correct way to spell this out for entering in a checkbook.  I wish that I had one with me at the time, but honestly, I rarely use my checkbook these days so I do not carry it with me and did not have it.  He seemed to pick up on the format though, so hopefully that was really the case.

His second assignment was to write sentences about his typical day.  There was an example worksheet that started from the time he woke up in the morning and continued until he got home from school.  We went through this together and he corrected the order in which he completed tasks.  He then went through a lesson about his desk at school where he had to decide whether items were in or on something (ex: The clock is ON the wall.  The pencils are IN the desk.).  This was a pretty easy task for him to complete.