Andy TP#1

         On Monday, September 1st, I went over to Ms. Kim's house and had a tutoring session with her son PJ. He is a wonderful little guy and Ms. Kim had informed me that they mainly speak Korean at home and she would like for him to work on his English more because he doesn't get to use it as much. PJ was kinda shy at first so I tried to get him to open up a little and talk about a few things other than school. This was a good opportunity for me to get an idea of how fluent/comfortable he was speaking/comprehending English. He had little to no problems understand and communicating with me.

Ms. Kim already had some home work for us to do so I knew we wouldn't have to find something that was the right level for him. The worksheet was for reading comprehension and so I had him read  the paragraphs out loud, which he had almost no trouble, sometimes when there was a big word he didn't know, he would sound it out and usually get it right with out my help, but for a few words I would chime in and say it so he could hear it pronounced correctly. The first worksheet was about Thanksgiving and had a few questions about the story to see if he understood what he had just read and PJ answered them all with little help from me. The next story was about two brothers and the worksheet asked us to put certain events in the order they occurred. This was a little confusing and took us looking back at the story to see when things happened, but still PJ was able to figure the correct answers.

After we finished the homework we took a little more time to talk about things outside of school/homework. I think this is important because children's attention spans are shorter and I didn't want him to get burnt out on working. Also I felt the need to build up a rapport with PJ. I remember when I was a kid and I had to have tutor's, I don't want our sessions to be boring or stressful to the point where he's not looking forward to our meetings.

After the homework we read from a human biology science book. I had him pick out a page that looked interesting and read a paragraph aloud and then I read a paragraph and we would talk about what we had just read and try gain some understanding of it. We read about the digestive system, coughs and sneezes, etc. This gave him a few more opportunities to try a figure out some bigger words, with which I was very impressed at his ability to get most of the words with little to no help from me. We did this for about 30 min. and the last page we read was about memories which sparked a conversation between us about a field trip and his trip this summer to Korea, where he spends most of his summers. It was a good way to end our first tutoring session.