Andy TP#3

Today I had my second tutoring session with PJ. He had 2 worksheets for homework and his teacher had sent a Florida Reading book home with him to work out of. The worksheets were pretty straight forward. The first had us working on reading comprehension. PJ read two paragraphs that had steps on how to start a library for a classroom, where students could check out books on their own. We then had to answer questions on what the steps were. PJ was able to figure out the answers pretty easily with little help from me. The second worksheet was a little tougher for him, it was a vocabulary lesson of about 8 words. We went over each word and I asked him if he knew what they meant, he knew about half of them. The exercise had the definition on the left and the vocabulary words on the right (not in the correct order), PJ had to draw a line from the definition to the correct word. Then we were asked to make up two sentences using two of the words, I had PJ make up four simple sentences using whichever words from the list he wanted.
The Florida Reading book was interesting. Ms. Kim had told me it was a "test book" and that the students would be tested on one of these stories in the classroom for FCAT or whatever statewide testing program they have now. I looked through it before our session and it was a bunch of short stories with lots of information, questions and additional things after each story to help students practice, understand and prepare for the test. I found a story from one of my favorite author/illustrators as a kid, Tomie dePaola and wanted to read that but it was a little too long so we chose a shorter story that I had also heard of called Dogzilla. It was an interesting read that even included some of PJ's vocabulary words that we had just worked on and also included some "made up" words that PJ need help figuring out. The best example of this was the word "Mouseopolis", which was where the mice in the story lived and I knew what the author was saying but I had to help PJ pronounce and see if he understood this term. I explained that a metropolis was a big city and since this was the big city where the mice lived its name was "Mouseopolis". I covered up the last half of the word to show him that "Mouse" was in the word and I told him this was a "pun", but I don't know if he was familiar with puns. After the story I asked him some of the comprehension questions from the book and we discussed a few things, which he really seemed to respond to, but perhaps he was also more lively because our session was coming to an end.