KellyTP-8

I met with Carolina about a week before this session, but she had to leave early and suddenly due to her son's illness at school. I of course started the session asking if he was feeling better. To my surprise, she had written a paragraph in English on the incident for us to go over. Her ideas were very fluid in writing, with some minor grammatical errors throughout the composition. I was so impressed by this self induced practice.
I asked her how the Parent/Teacher meeting had gone, and as I imagined, her son was just a boy being a boy. He had not had any behavioral incidents in some time, and had just received an award for "most improved." (He might be the only child at the school who comes from an exclusively Spanish speaking household). I asked her if she ever attended PTA meetings. She had, and we both agreed that there were a bit strange. She assumed they would be talking about making improvements to the school and the children's education, but just seemed to be focused on ways to make money via bake sales and the like.
She brought a fresh list of vocabulary words from the book she is reading. Among memorable words was "spirits." She wondered why the word spirits can be found on liquor signs. I explained the old fashioned nature of the word- spirits being contained in liquor that posses you when imbibed. The term never seemed more amusing.
We spent the rest of the session working on Past tense. I gave her a list of commonly used verbs and their past tense form. We watched a Youtube video geared towards explaining aspects of past tense. Using cues from the video, I wrote answers to questions such as:  "Where did you live? "I used to live in Tampico." "When were you born?" and son on. Carolina is an active learner and has lots of great questions and insight. She adds more to the lessons than I can have hoped to plan for.
We finished the session doing a "cloze" worksheet of past tense sentences. She aced it with flying colors. She read the sentences, and answered them outloud. I asked her to write a similar paragraph for our next session on her past. I left it open ended, but suggested things such as her hometown, a memorable event, etc.