Kelly TP-7

I met with Michelle after class for her tutoring lesson. She had requested help on learning "fruits." I found a video on Youtube which shows a picture of said fruit, announces it's name in written and auditory form for a list of about 10 common fruits. Once it goes through one sequence it shows the fruit and its written name and the participants announce them. She did fairly well with the first go round.
As her difficulty with pronunciation has become quite apparent, I decided to start from the basics and work on vowel sounds. I began with long vowels (mate, ice, etc). I practiced an exercise in which I would ask her to tell me if she heard the "A" sound in words I pronounced, going through all the vowels. Unfortunately, she did not do very well with this. I went over the sounds again. I then had a prepared sheet and asked her to mark which word I pronounce is different among three words. (Mat, Mate, Mat- the X goes in the center). She did a little better with this, but I am not sure if it was due to chance alone.
I then went into an explanation of short vowels (more, cut) comparing them with long vowels (cute vs cut). I think she was beginning to understand where I was going with this exercise. I announced example words for each vowel in both short and long sounds, and had her repeat them. I asked her to concentrate on the vowel sound and to not get too hung up on pronouncing the whole word correctly. She did quite well with the vowel sounds, and I could tell we were making some progress. I had an exercise planned to test her on this, but realized that we had probably done too many already.
We went over some things she was working on in class and I asked her to tell me things about her day/week in order to get her to practice her speaking more casually. She shared her progress reports with me, and she is doing very well in writing, reading, and listening.
We finished the session by watching the fruit video again. After it was over, I had a prepared list of the fruits in the video. I wrote out the words phonetically for her using our recent lesson in long and short vowels. I think it helped, and I asked her to study this and the lists of words with the two vowel sounds that I provided for her.