Olumayowa TP-9

On the last week of CIES classes, Aadl wanted to meet me because he was nervous about the exam in his grammar class. I remember the first day that we met, when he was clutching onto a huge grammar workbook that he had been slaving away at even though he was fairly clueless about the vocabulary that it used. I think there was a part in the first chapter in the Snow textbook we read about language learners who feel like it's the most difficult part of the process so they disregard much of their work and focus on grammar; Aadl can do this all day. He wanted us to meet on this day because he wasn't very confident about the chapter Gerunds & Infinitives and wanted some help in reviewing it. Thankfully, I have created a lesson plan on Gerunds & Infinitives! I'm a very media oriented thinker so I loaded my backpack with magazines like National Geographic(I have a cache of issues from the 1970's and 80's), Sport Rider, Backpacker, MountainBike, e.t.c.; I've wasted so much money on these and was finally happy to put them to use! I had pored through the magazines and put tabs on the pictures that I wanted to use for our activity, mainly pictures with people doing things so that we could write about their actions using gerund sentence structures. Aadl took to this like clockwork, which made me feel really good because it was the first time I really used my entire lesson plan to help a student and I was happy that it was useful. After this he worked on a worksheet from the lesson (which I hope i attached to this post correctly!) and then we got into his textbook from class to take a look at how his teacher explained the topic and how I could build upon it.

The book described it somehow like:

Gerund is the –ing form of a verb, and is used in the same ways as a noun. It is used as a subject or as an object in a sentence. It can also be used as a subject and an object within the same sentence, as follow:
a) Washing his car is the only thing he does almost every Sunday.
b) She prefers any of the household chores to mopping.
c) Skipping to him is a better alternative to jogging.

but there were still a few points in its explanation that I didn't understand very clearly. Maybe I should photocopy my tutoring partners' textbooks so I know exactly which direction my tutoring should approach from, and most importantly to do the activities in each chapter so I know that I completely understand the material that I might be going over with them later. We went over the activities in the book and there were a few points where we disagreed about the answers and he ended up being the correct one. Needless to say, quite embarassing : p.