Marissa_TP#9

Marissa M.
Tutoring Blog #9
9/30/14

I just finished another tutoring session with Jairo.  For this session I took him out of his usual classroom - where we have been meeting after his class - and into a smaller group study room since his instructor and a few other students were practicing after class.  I have found that he does much better when it is just me and him in the room.  Our first session the instructor was present and working on the computer in the corner, however, she would add comments to our session and by doing so he knew that she was listening in.  This seemed to intimidate him a little bit and he was not as talkative.  I mentioned this to the instructor and requested that she not be in the room when we tutor and she agreed to this.  Sessions then seemed to go a little better and I mentioned this to her.  It helps with both his stress and speaking in front of others on topics he is studying - and potentially feels like he should already know - as well as him only using English.  The instructor speaks both English and Spanish and thus when she is around he will often ask her questions in his native language instead of trying to form the question himself in the English he knows.  He is much more talkative now and seems more intent on listening to what I say too.

At the start of our session we reviewed what we learned yesterday about adding "s," "es," or "ies" to words to make them plural.  We went through several worksheets and he pointed out what form was needed to pluralize words.  After our session, I spoke to the instructor and said he was still questioning the different forms.  I then found out they had only learned about the "ies" and changing the "y" in words to "ies" for plural forms - they have not yet covered "es" words at his level.  He is in a mixed level class and thus the instructor has different lessons and worksheets for various students.  Jairo is still at the Foundations level.  We both thought his curiosity and quick learning of the "es" form is good though - it means he is listening to the other students and lectures and understanding more on his own.  The instructor was going to see about getting me some additional worksheets from their lessons to practice the plural forms of words with him. 

We worked on some more of his homework that was given.  The lesson was more or less the same as the one they had been working on the other day - just repetitive sentence writing exercises and fill in the blanks about items you would find in or on a desk/shelves/etc.  As we were running through this lesson he noted that my accent and his instructors accent sounded very different when we said words.  One example he used was "cabinet."  He asked where I was from and I told him Tallahassee - the South.  And we then had a brief discussion on the variety of accents found in the United States and how in different regions pronunciation varies.  He found this very interesting and compared it to Spanish and Portugues speakers (since he knows I speak some Portugues). 

In this lesson I taught him about the possessive forms of nouns for the first time.  His class level has not yet learned this - only the plural form.  However, one of his worksheets included a possessive form of teacher and I wanted to make sure he understood the difference since we were in the middle of a discussion on punctuation.  He seemed to pick up on this, however, we did agree to review this again and I am going to look for another worksheet to help.  The other punctuation we went over was that used to end a sentence and the different meanings that each form can take.  Specifically, we talked about the period, question mark, and exclamation point.  I noticed that Jairo had not been ending all of his sentences with punctuation.  I stressed the importance of this as it can change the meaning of the sentence.  I used an example sentence from his homework "Pencils are on the bottom shelf," and changed it up with intonation to show the different ways punctuation sounded. 






Finally, we went over the differences in two, too, and to.  Two was fairly easy for him - the number.  We compared this to two people (like us) in the room.  He understood the form of too when it takes on the meaning of also.  However, trying to explain why we use to was a little more difficult.  I told him I would get other examples and a better explanation for this next time - he was having some problems understanding mine today so I need to simplify it a little.  Again, I mentioned this to his instructor who said he was probably more interested because the higher level students in the class were just covering this today.  She is going to see about finding some additional materials for me.