Marissa_TP#12

Marissa M.
Tutoring Blog #12
10/7/14

At our last meeting, Andressa mentioned wanting to work on pronouns and new vocabulary words.  She is preparing for the TOEFL exam and thought these two items would best help her improve English and prepare.  Nina and Gabriela were with her and were also interested in this.

For the lesson, I had prepared a modified game based on one of my favorites, Scattergories.  All three of these ladies have fairly good vocabulary.  Thus, I thought this would be an appropriate game to get them thinking about words they know in a fairly quick fashion.  However, after writing down words from the list in the way you usually play Sacttergories, I prepared a box with commonly misused prepositions.  After they finished their word lists, I had them use the prepositions to write sentences using the words they had come up with.

Anna sat in on our lesson, and participated for the fun of it as well as to show that this can be a difficult game for even native speakers.  Together we had five players.  I asked each person to chose one of the lists from a stack.  Normally, each person would get a copy of the same list.  For this game each person got a different list.  I thought this would be a better way to get additional vocabulary words in when we reviewed everyone's answers.  The group agreed that we would have two minutes time to try and find a word for each of the twelve subjects on the list.  In order to be fair with the dice rolling to select a letter, I asked for each person to give me a number between one and twenty.  Whoever was closest got to roll the die. For the first round Gabriela guessed seven, which was correct, and got to roll the dice.  She rolled a G for the first round and all of the girls were a little hesitant because of the letter and their matching lists.

Before starting the clock, I asked each person to look over their lists and tell me about any words they didn't understand or descriptions.  For instance, one wanted clarification on what "Items You Save Up For" meant and another wasn't sure what "Appliances" were.  After reviewing vocabulary they didn't recognize and the questions we began.

The first round I helped Andressa and Gabriela a bit through the process and Anna helped Nina, since she was sitting by her.  They got a bit frustrated by this activity because they didn't realize how difficult it was to come up with words related to certain topics, especially in such a short amount of time.

After the first round, we went around to see how each did.  Most got three to five words completed, out of the twelve on the sheets.  All girls expressed how difficult it was for them to think of words in English - but they wouldn't have as much problems coming up with words in Portuguese.  When the discussion was over, they pulled prepositions from the box and formed sentences with their words.  We then went through them to see what changes to tense and word choice needed to be made.  Overall, they did a good job with sentence building though.

Thus, for the second round, I told them they had to first try and come up with an English word.  If they could not, then they were allowed to use a Portuguese word to answer but when they told us what the word was they had to then tell us what the word was in English as well.  This round worked a little bit better for them.

Overall, I think they enjoyed the activity and were able to come up with good vocabulary words and then put them in sentences.