Sarah- TP6

When we came back from our break and started our second hour of tutoring, Shivani brought her husband's ipad so she could show me pictures of her friends and family, and from her wedding. It was a traditional Indian wedding, and she was beautiful! She said her mother and her mother in law had been friends for years, and that's how her arranged marriage came about. Her husband was born and raised in Atlanta, but his parents are both from India. I wanted her to try to make sentences and after some repetition, had some success. But for the most part, its like putting a puzzle together between the random words she knows and the hand gesturing. It was still an interesting conversation though, and I loved learning about her family!

This conversation sparked some quick grammar lessons, and I eventually had her pointing out "These are my ears. These are my eyes. This is my nose. This is ..." for subject/verb agreement. We also talked about comparing things. She can say that her sister is old, but it's insulting and I had to do an impression of a walking with a cane and bad back to explain this. Older, or older than I am, means in comparison with her. We also did some question and answer examples, and I showed her how you can often use the question to begin her answer: What is her name? Her name is...

After this, we moved on to the book we had picked out, which was a great book for her level. It was a picture guessing game, and each page showed a small portion of an animal such as its wing, tail, or a silhouette. On that page it gave facts about the animal. "I have six legs, I have two beautiful wings, I can fly and walk, but I cannot swim underwater. Can you guess what my name is?" Then on the next page, it says I am a butterfly, and gave the full picture. This was perfect because last time we read a book, she seemed to be reading for completion and I had to keep stopping her to answer questions and make sure she understood. This book provided incentive to understand what she was reading. By the end she was guessing snake (although the answer was earthworm, I knew she understood a lot of what she read) and she correctly guessed the last page, which was human! I loved this resource and it just shows how important it is to create incentive (hopefully fun) for comprehension.

At the end, I gave her the homework sheets from the first half of our session, and showed her the level two sheets as well, explaining that the passages are longer and they may take more time to understand and answer, but that we will move on to these soon. I hope this gave her some perspective, a rationalization for the easier worksheets she is doing now, and a sense of progress, seeing where she is headed. We are meeting again next Monday for another (two) sessions.